After graduating in 2021, Ajao joined Woodcore, a Lagos-based fintech platform that provides core banking infrastructure and software for financial institutions, as a frontend engineer. It was his first full-time role after university.

At Woodcore, Ajao says he led the frontend experience, taking charge of key features, reviewing code and helping other engineers improve. The role gave him his first sustained experience of working within a professional engineering team and helped him grow as an engineer.

“I was able to work within a team that valued growth. I learned a lot and also I was able to improve as an engineer as well,” he says.

Woodcore also changed how he thought about the possibilities of a career in tech. The company operated remotely, and some of the friends who had introduced him to coding were already working for international companies. Seeing their experiences made him realise he could work for companies outside Nigeria without leaving the country.

That realisation pushed Ajao to look beyond the Nigerian job market. In 2022, he joined Offscript, a Swedish company, as a senior software engineer.

From front stack to full stack

At Offscript, Ajao began working on the backend as well as the frontend, eventually becoming a full-stack engineer. He already had some backend experience from personal projects, but the company’s backend had little documentation. He had to learn how the different systems worked and how they interacted with one another. 

“That moment was how I started understanding some of those things, learning and all. After that period, I didn’t stop. I continued learning my back-end skill,” Ajao says.

Ajao began enjoying backend development more as he spent time working on it. After years of frontend development, he had started to find the work repetitive, while backend engineering gave him new problems to solve. 

“I’d been doing front-end for a long time. And for me, it was already getting boring. Back-end was just something I started enjoying and started focusing on more” 

His responsibilities at Offscript also grew beyond writing code. Ajao began leading feature development from requirements through to production, reviewing other engineers’ work and, at times, leading small teams. 

“They can assign me to lead a feature. They’d be like, we want to build a feature, lead the development of that feature from requirements to production,” Ajao says.

Ajao worked at Offscript until early 2024, when the company was acquired by Superfiliate, a US-based creator-commerce software company. He says he spent the next few months taking on freelance work while looking for another international role.

He eventually joined Aurio AI, a German AI company focused on automating talent sourcing for recruiters. Ajao says he worked as a frontend engineer on the company’s customer application, improving its interface and user experience.

By May 2025, he had left the company.

“The company wanted all their employees  to come on site to the office every day, and because I’m in Nigeria, they said they are not able to sponsor me to come over there, so my contract ended with them.”

Beyond the job  

While Ajao was working at Aurio AI, he was also building something of his own.

It started with an event he and his friends organised in Lagos. After using TIX, a ticketing platform, to sell tickets for the first edition, they wondered whether they could build their own ticketing platform. So they built Bitooqoh.

Ajao led the engineering team, and the event was successful enough that other organisers began asking to use the platform.

“We created a form and we had close to 60 people wanting to use it,” he says. “This was something internal we built for ourselves. Seeing people ask for it made a difference.”

They began onboarding other events, fixing issues and adding features based on organisers’ requests. Ajao says Bitooqoh has since launched and the team is expanding into Kenya.

Building the platform also changed how Ajao viewed running a company. At his previous jobs, his role had largely been to execute what the company needed. With Bitooqoh, the decisions were his.

“It is never easy building a product,” he says. “You are in charge of a lot of things, and the success of the project kind of lies in the decisions you make.”

His experience leading teams at previous companies also helped.

“I’m an easygoing type that finds it easy working with people,” he says. “So, while building Bitooqoh, the leadership was something that came easily.”

Beyond Bitooqoh, Ajao is becoming interested in cybersecurity and AI. His interest in cybersecurity started from conversations with his elder brother, who works in the field.

“We usually have a lot of discussions, trying to just understand different things in cybersecurity and software engineering,” he says. “That kind of made me to become interested in the different ways we can use technology to protect people.”

When AI became more prominent, Ajao initially saw it as a threat. He eventually realised he needed to adapt and find ways to use it.

That interest deepened after he briefly worked with Trotter, a company building tools to protect people from online threats such as phishing and social engineering.

“I am really interested in how AI can be used to make sure that people are always safe on the internet,” he says. “As technology grows and hacking becomes more sophisticated, we need to also provide the security to keep people safe everywhere.”

For the next year, Ajao wants to take his products further. Bitooqoh has processed about ₦190 million in ticket sales, and he hopes to push that beyond ₦500 million. He also wants to contribute more to open source.

“I’m obsessed with overdoing open source contributions,” he says. “I want to give back to society by doing something people can benefit from without having to pay anything.”

Over the years, Ajao says he has learned never to stop trying.

“Even if you are going to fail, just start,” he says. “When you fail, there’s going to be a lot of lessons to take from that and use that to even get better.”

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