About

Hey, I'm Divine.

DevOps, Backend & Cloud Engineer. Co-Founder & CTO at Kira AI. Senior DevOps Engineer at Travi Mobile. Based in Nigeria.

Divine Chukwu at the Kira AI booth

The path

I started building things in Nigeria the way most engineers here start, figuring out what's possible and shipping before it's polished.

While studying Computer & Electronics Engineering at University of Nigeria, Nsukka, I co-founded Y-Queue?. Social-feed-driven food delivery, basically TikTok meets Uber Eats. I led backend and owned the AWS infrastructure it ran on. Three years later, we were acquired. That experience taught me something I now treat as gospel: simplicity beats cleverness when real money is involved.

In parallel, contract and freelance work, including six months as sole backend and infrastructure lead for Activity Rewards, a gamified fitness app for Revive Active (UK). Real-time leaderboards over WebSockets, AWS deployment, the lot. International client delivery taught me to operate the systems I build, not just hand them off.

Late 2025 I co-founded Kira AI, WhatsApp-native banking. Send money, pay bills, manage accounts, all inside a chat. No app install, no friction. As CTO I designed the platform from zero. That meant application architecture, cloud infrastructure on AWS, payment integrations, and the operational tooling that keeps it all running. Today: 9,000+ users, ₦519M+ processed across five payment rails. Around the same time I joined Travi Mobile as a DevOps Engineer running production Kubernetes on AWS EKS; promoted to Senior three months later.

Outside of that, I write. Two ongoing series, AWS Daily with Divine and K8s with Divine, are my way of turning operational scars into things other engineers can learn from before they get burned the same way.

What I value

  • Boring tech wins. Pick the stack you can ship and operate. Novelty is a tax you pay every on-call shift.
  • Production over perfection. A working system in production beats an elegant system in a branch. Always.
  • Observability is a feature. If you can't answer “what is the system doing right now?” with data, you're flying blind.
  • Simplicity beats cleverness when real money is involved. Users care about their money arriving correctly, not how elegant your API design is.

What I'm interested in

Co-Founder & CTO at Kira AI. I'm happy to talk to teams working on:

  • Senior DevOps / Platform / SRE roles, especially at fintechs, payments companies, or infrastructure SaaS where the system actually runs in production with real users and real money.
  • Senior Cloud Engineering / Solutions Architect roles, designing and operating AWS-native systems for the same kind of company.
  • Senior backend engineering roles where the codebase carries the same weight.

Based in Nigeria. Remote-first. Open to relocation for the right opportunity.

Less interested in ad-tech, crypto, or anywhere the pitch leads with “we're disrupting.” I want to ship infrastructure, not slogans.

Quickest path