Hands-on Data & AI Platform Leader · Senior/Staff Data & AI Engineer · Analytics Engineering · Information System
I build governed cloud data platforms, production AI systems, and teams that turn data into decisions, products, and margin.
I spent nearly seven years at Gozem, the African mobility, commerce, and fintech super app, progressing from the group's first data professional to Data Director:
- Global Data Analyst · Nov 2019–Sep 2022: established the data function and grew the initial team from 0 to 4
- Head of Data · Oct 2022–Mar 2025: scaled the organization from 4 to 14+ across analytics, engineering, and domain-aligned squads
- Data Director · Apr 2025–Jul 2026: owned group data and AI strategy, platform, products, governance, FinOps, people operations, budgets, contractors, and vendors
I am also open to consulting engagements. As a Data Management Consultant with the UN International Trade Centre in 2023, I advised 15 early-stage ECOWAS startups on data strategy and coached five founders one-on-one.
Data & decision systems
- Defined and governed cross-market KPIs for country managers, Finance, Operations, Product, and executive reporting
- Expanded self-service analytics to 12+ active managers and cut routine query demand on the central data team by about half
- Applied RFM, cohort, CAC/LTV, attribution, funnel, fraud, and marketplace analysis to operating and growth decisions
Analytics engineering
- Migrated 10+ TB and 50+ ELT/ETL pipelines to BigQuery in one quarter without interrupting operations
- Built a daily upsert system processing approximately 5 TB across Airflow and Dataform workloads
- Operated nearly 300 Dataform models and Airflow DAGs combined, with data-quality monitoring across hundreds of source and analytical tables
- Built reusable Dataform patterns for partition-aware MERGE, schema evolution, assertions, and business-rule tests
- Reduced Google Cloud cost by about 43% in one quarter while maintaining data freshness and integrity expectations
Platform & applied AI engineering
- Architected the Gozem Data Hub, a modular React and FastAPI platform serving 650+ employees and partners across five African operating countries and Singapore HQ
- Personally coded 17 of its 19 microservices, including a dynamic API gateway, centralized identity and RBAC, shared Google integrations, audit and notification capabilities, and production job orchestration
- Established reusable service standards for authentication, permissions, migrations, health checks, audit events, observability, retries, recovery, and deployment
- Built gated GitLab delivery pipelines with linting, automated tests, container builds, Trivy vulnerability scanning, staged promotion, releases, and failure notifications
- Shipped 30+ production AI and automation tools, including a Gemini document-extraction workflow that reduced a monthly five-country finance process from 1–1.5 weeks to under one day
- Built G-Force, a mobile-first operational application that onboarded roughly 700 field agents and reached about 200 daily users
People & portfolio leadership
- Built the data organization from 0 to 14+, managed eight domain leads, evaluated 50+ candidates, and onboarded 12 hires with structured 30/60/90-day plans
- Cataloged 100+ data and AI use cases, selected the top 15 for the roadmap, and aligned delivery with business leaders across the group
- Owned hiring, performance reviews, promotions, compensation recommendations, budgets, contractors, and vendor negotiations
Research & community
- Founding Vice-Chair, iSheero: developing AI and data talent in Benin and Francophone Africa
- Co-founded and chaired Takwimu LAB, co-creating a 70,000+ sentence French–Fongbe/French–Ewe dataset: Zenodo · AfricaNLP at EACL 2021
- Won the 2020 Zindi AI4D African Language Dataset Challenge with Takwimu LAB
| Project | What it is |
|---|---|
| iBola · live | Bilingual agentic RAG assistant with LangGraph, Gemini, BM25 + vector retrieval, reciprocal-rank fusion, claim-level grounding verification, Langfuse observability, evaluation gates, and Cloud Run CI/CD |
| Iyanju Agentory | MIT-licensed, cross-agent AI skills for Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode, and Gemini CLI, with plugin and CLI distribution |
| GCP Dataform Modeling Lab | Production-tested Dataform framework for BigQuery: incremental logic, partition-aware assertions, schema evolution, business-rule tests, and modular pipelines |
| Apps & tools · live | Public catalog of self-built applications, automation tools, and data products |
| uDownloader | Fast async video downloader (CLI + desktop GUI) for YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X, Vimeo. On PyPI: pip install udownloader |
| Google Workspace + Python | Reusable tutorials and automation patterns for Google Drive, Sheets, and Python |
| Salaire BÉNIN · live | Tested Google Cloud Functions API and web app for net/gross salary calculations under Benin's 2025 finance law |
Analytics & BI SQL · Python · R · KPI design · cohort/RFM · CAC/LTV · Looker · Metabase
Analytics Engineering BigQuery · Dataform · dimensional modeling · SCD 1/2 · assertions · Airflow
Platform Engineering FastAPI · React · Nginx · MongoDB · Redis · NATS · Dataflow · REST APIs
Applied AI LangGraph · RAG · hybrid retrieval · reranking · Gemini · Langfuse · MCP
Security & Reliability RBAC · JWT/OTP · service auth · audit events · rate limits · health checks · retries
Cloud & Delivery Google Cloud · Cloud Run · GCS · Docker · GitLab/GitHub CI/CD · Trivy · Prometheus
Leadership Data & AI strategy · platform roadmaps · org design · hiring · governance · FinOps
bolablg.com · Ask iBola · Blog · LinkedIn · hello@bolablg.com