Ekerete
Akpan

August 2023 – Present · Remote

• ▸Co-founded and built QuizOut end to end - generation pipeline, plugin distribution, in-product review experience, and usage-based billing model; now entering pilot testing
• ▸Re-architected the product from deterministic quiz generation over structured data to an LLM pipeline over unstructured article content, once model capability had improved enough to make that approach reliable - an evidence-led adoption decision rather than an AI-first default
• ▸Designed the product around a human-in-the-loop control: every AI-generated quiz is reviewed, edited, and approved by a person before it can publish, keeping the model advisory rather than autonomous
• ▸Kept customer content and quiz results inside the customer's own environment rather than on external servers, reducing third-party data exposure and simplifying the data protection story for publishers
• ▸Built usage-based cost controls (credit and post-pack model) so per-generation LLM spend stays predictable as volume grows
• ▸Applied ISO/IEC 42001 thinking to a live product - reviewing output quality, defining where human judgement is mandatory, and documenting the limits of what the system should decide alone

January 2026 – Present · United Kingdom

• ▸Advised ClearModel, an early-stage AI governance startup, on platform architecture and engineering practice - translating EU AI Act and ISO/IEC 42001 requirements into concrete product features and engineering controls
• ▸Shaped ClearModel's technical roadmap and engineering foundations, bridging compliance, product, and go-to-market decisions for a platform supporting responsible AI adoption
• ▸Advise startup founders and engineering teams on stack selection, architecture, and build-versus-buy decisions
• ▸Deliver hands-on development work across Rails and modern web stacks alongside advisory engagements

December 2025 – May 2026 · London (Remote)

• ▸Owned the delivery roadmap and milestone tracking for the post-acquisition integration of AZA Finance's services onto the dLocal platform
• ▸Coordinated cross-functional migration planning across engineering, product, and operations in both organisations, surfacing risks and unblocking dependencies to maintain continuity of service
• ▸Acted as a knowledge bridge between AZA Finance and dLocal teams, assisting with onboarding, documentation, and handover

April 2020 – November 2025 · London (Remote)

• ▸Led the engineering team behind the high-availability Ruby on Rails services powering currency exchange and remittance across 15+ African markets - over $1bn in annual transaction volume, on a run rate approaching $2.5bn at the point of dLocal's acquisition
• ▸Took the team from a single weekly deploy event to full continuous deployment multiple times a day, backed by end-to-end tests in a pre-production stage - raising deployment frequency and cutting lead time without trading away change failure rate
• ▸Instrumented DORA metrics - deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and MTTR - and used them to drive process and tooling decisions across the engineering team
• ▸Owned the technical roadmap end to end: database schema, API contracts, service architecture, and infrastructure for regulated cross-border payment flows
• ▸Established the engineering standards the team still runs on - code review, testing strategy, API design, and CI/CD pipelines

September 2018 – March 2020 · Lagos, Nigeria

• ▸Built core Ruby on Rails backend services for currency exchange, remittance, and payments
• ▸Worked across the stack - Rails APIs, PostgreSQL, React.js frontends
• ▸Contributed to architectural migration from monolith to service-oriented Rails codebase