The Contributor Mindset: Inside the Journey of Femi Alayesanmi, Head of Engineering at Mono

Femi Alayesanmi’s storied journey, from growing up without a computer to leading Mono’s Engineering and the Future of African tech. 

Alayesanmi did not grow up around computers. He grew up in Ota, in a neighbourhood where the idea of sitting in front of a screen and telling it what to do belonged to another world entirely. 

The first time he really encountered one was in an MTN Foundation computer lab set up at Iganmode Grammar School after the school’s Jet Club won a mathematics Olympiad. He was not even part of the winning team. He was just close enough to benefit from what the win unlocked.

That accidental proximity to technology turned out to be the beginning of everything.

By the time he got to university, Alayesanmi had already decided he did not want to study computer science. His original dream was to build cars. 

Automobile engineering felt like the most direct path to that, but no university was offering it cleanly, and mechanical engineering did not appeal to him. Computer science ended up being the closest thing to building something from nothing, and so he committed to it fully. Hence, he graduated with a first class in his first degree from the Federal University, Lokoja.

The goal was never the grade

The first class in itself was not the goal for Alayesanmi. It was also not about job offers or interview advantages, though it eventually delivered both. It was about something closer to a personal standard.

“My motivation for finishing with a first class was to just be the best,” he said. “It was not to have a good job after school. If I were going to do this thing, then I had to do it very, very well.”

That philosophy shaped what came after. The first class gave him options, which is perhaps the most honest way to describe what academic excellence actually delivers. He could have gone into academia. He could have taken the corporate route. He could have built a company straight out of school. Instead, the Software Engineer chose to build things, and the market quickly rewarded that clarity. He had his first full-time role within five months of finishing university.

He missed his own convocation. He was too busy fixing a production bug.

From PHP to fintech infrastructure

The first thing Alayesanmi ever built was an agro-e-commerce platform during his industrial training that connected farmers directly with buyers. PHP was the computer language of that moment. He used JavaScript to construct the frontend. But more than the technology, the experience taught him what it meant to construct a system from the ground up, not just write code that runs, but think through what a working product actually requires.

That instinct for building led him to Forloop, a six-week hands-on programme organised by Prosper Otemuyiwa that brought together young developers with shared hunger and obsession. They built a meal booking app. The app was modest. The experience was not.

“It was my first time meeting other people who had similar interests in one room,” he said. “And then I learned that there are actually best practices for how to build software. You can’t just write from scratch and assume that because it works, it’s fine.”

The best participants from Forloop were accepted into Andela. However, he also received an offer from a payments company in Lagos. The pay was better compared to Andela, and building something there felt more urgent. 

This was the early days of POS infrastructure in Nigeria. Moniepoint was still called TeamApt. Paystack was just starting. UPSL was the only company processing card transactions online. He joined the payments company as a backend engineer and walked into his first proper development team, with people working across Android, backend, POS, and front-end, all at once.

He stayed long enough to understand how the payments infrastructure actually worked at its foundations. Then he left for CoinRule, a UK startup automating crypto trading, where he spent two years inside his first real startup environment. Then came Mono.

Five years at the frontier of open banking

Mono is where Alayesanmi’s career crystallised. He joined as a software engineer. He is now Head of Engineering. The journey between those two points took five years and spanned some of the most consequential infrastructure work happening in Nigerian fintech.

Open banking, as a category, is defined by uncertainty. Regulations shift. APIs break. Financial institutions change the rules mid-build. The companies that survive in that environment are the ones whose engineering teams have learned to build from the problem outward rather than from the technology inward.

“Some of the work that we’ve done at Mono is incredible,” he said. “Just building from the problem first, not from the stack we should use. We see a problem, there’s an identity problem in Nigeria, it’s really hard to know if this person has been watch-listed by NIBSS, and then we sit down and build it.”

That approach, unglamorous as it sounds, is what great infrastructure engineering actually looks like. It is not about the elegance of the code. It is about whether the system solves the real problem cleanly enough that businesses can build on top of it.

Late last year, Mono was acquired by Flutterwave. As Mono’s Head of Engineering, the acquisition felt more personal than professional validation. “When I knew, I was like, is this good?” he said. “But then when I looked at it, it was interesting because we’re a small team, and being a small team means everybody on the team is a contributor. Everybody has the responsibility.”

He had tried two or three startups of his own before Mono, and they had failed. What those failures taught him sits at the centre of how he thinks about building now. “You don’t always have to overthink it,” he said. “The way it comes to your mind, just execute it. The whole goal is just to execute. Good execution is what makes good companies.”

What engineers are getting wrong

Alayesanmi leads a team, which gives him direct insight into the habits that hold engineers back. His diagnosis is not about technical skill. It is about mindset. “Good code is not cheap,” he said. “Code in general is cheap. But good working code is not cheap.”

The arrival of AI has made it easier than ever to generate code that runs. What has not changed is whether that code is built on sound thinking. The engineers he trusts with responsibility are not the most technically impressive ones. They are the ones with a contributor mindset, the ones who take ownership of a problem without waiting to be asked.

“Today, I lead a team and the people I’m comfortable giving responsibility to are people who have a contributor mindset,” he said. “That is the only way I will be okay to work with them and give them more responsibilities.”

His advice to engineers entering the field now is to resist the illusion of arrival. Senior title, high salary, years of experience: none of it is a destination. “There is no, oh, I’m at the peak now,” he said. “Don’t ever assume that you are ever there. Just keep learning new technologies and always have a contributor mindset.”

The next ten years

Alayesanmi is ten years into a career that has moved from a grammar school computer lab in Ota to the head of engineering seat at one of Nigeria’s most significant open banking companies. The next ten, he says, will be about building in Africa in a way that actually changes what is possible here.

He is not satisfied with the current map of African unicorns. Almost all of them live in the payments space. The problems worth solving in energy, agriculture, and infrastructure remain mostly untouched. That is where he wants to go.

“If you solve one simple daily problem very well in Africa, you will affect a lot of lives,” he said. “My vision for the next ten years is to affect the landscape of Africa from Africa.”

When he is not thinking about systems architecture or engineering culture, Femi is drinking coffee, playing FIFA, watching football, and making a strong case for Argentina to win the 2026 World Cup again. He is a Messi man, unconditionally, which perhaps tells you something about how he thinks about excellence in general. Some things, he believes, are simply better when they are the best.

Last updated: June 26, 2026