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Shepherd Umanah

I’m Shepherd. I build the whole thing.

I’m a software engineer based in Lagos, Nigeria. I build across the stack: web, mobile, and the services and system design underneath. Since 2019 that work has been in places where failure is expensive: card issuance, B2B payments, electronic medical records, and national pension verification.

That’s shaped how I work more than any particular technology has. When a system holds someone’s salary or their medical history, the interesting engineering question is rarely how to add a feature. It’s how to add one without disturbing what already works.

Right now I’m on the Pryme team at Qore Technologies, which sits behind the issuance of 85% of all cards in Nigeria. Alongside that I take on contract work, and I build things of my own. An S3-compatible object storage server, an ORM that brings Entity Framework patterns to Go, and a live streaming platform from RTMP ingestion through to adaptive playback.

C# and .NET most days, Go by preference for infrastructure, TypeScript and React on the client. I like owning both ends: when the same person designs the API and the screen consuming it, a whole category of integration argument never happens. This site and its 3D workspace are mine end to end.

Get in touchSee the work
Shepherd Umanah, software engineer based in Lagos, Nigeria.
Based in
Lagos, Nigeria · WAT (UTC+1)
Currently
Software Engineer, Qore Technologies
Open to
Contract work and full-time roles
Replies
within one business day
Experience

Where I've worked

  1. August 2026 to Present

    Software Engineer

    Turing

    Remote · Contract

    Embedded with client engineering teams through Turing, building and shipping in their stack rather than around it.

    • Join existing teams as a senior engineer and work to their conventions, their review process and their release cadence. The point is to leave behind code the people who stay can maintain.
    • Take features from data model through API to the client application, then the deployment path that puts them in front of users.
    • Pick up performance and reliability work on systems already carrying traffic, where stopping the world for a rewrite is not on the table.
    • C#
    • .NET
    • Go
    • PostgreSQL
    • Docker
    • System Design

  2. September 2024 to Present

    Software Engineer II

    Qore Technologies

    Lagos, Nigeria · Full-time, Remote

    Backend engineering on two Qore products: Pryme, the card issuance platform behind 85% of all cards issued in Nigeria, and BankOne, the core banking platform used by over 500 African financial institutions.

    • Build and maintain backend systems in C# and ASP.NET Core for Pryme, which handles just-in-time card issuance at branches and self-service vending machines.
    • Work on BankOne, the cloud-native core banking platform serving more than 500 financial institutions across Africa.
    • Ship features across teams into platforms that are already live at national scale, with no acceptable downtime, and tune performance as volume grows.
    • C#
    • ASP.NET Core
    • PostgreSQL
    • Core Banking
    • EMV
    • Scalability

  3. May 2024 to September 2024

    Senior Software Engineer

    Amazing PhysioTherapy

    Lagos, Nigeria · Contract, Remote

    Built and shipped the backend for the Zimdoc EMR app, now serving 1000+ users and clinics.

    • Designed, built and deployed the Zimdoc EMR backend, which has served over 1,000 users and clinics.
    • Led the backend team in setting up a CI/CD pipeline, taking deploy time from three minutes to fifteen seconds.
    • Reworked server configuration and refactored the existing code, taking average response time from 92ms to 30ms.
    • Backend
    • CI/CD
    • Server Configuration
    • Performance

  4. September 2023 to September 2024

    Senior Software Engineer

    KayndrexSphere Group Ltd.

    London, United Kingdom · Remote

    Designed the backend architecture for a scalable B2B payment platform.

    • Designed and built the Laravel backend architecture for a B2B payment application handling processing across multiple platforms.
    • Developed RESTful APIs integrating payment processing with external financial institutions and client applications.
    • Implemented OAuth and JWT authentication to protect sensitive financial data.
    • Laravel
    • REST APIs
    • OAuth
    • JWT
    • Payments

  5. January 2023 to September 2023

    Backend Developer

    Secured Records Management Solutions

    Lagos, Nigeria · Hybrid

    Server-side development across C# and PHP Laravel services.

    • Designed, developed and maintained server-side components in C# and PHP Laravel.
    • Implemented business logic, database integration and APIs supporting core system functionality.
    • Held the backend infrastructure to consistent performance, reliability and security standards.
    • C#
    • PHP Laravel
    • Databases
    • API Development

  6. November 2019 to January 2023

    Web Developer

    TNN Newspaper

    Nigeria · Full-time

    Built and maintained the website for TNN, a Nigerian online newspaper, for just over three years.

    • Built and maintained the public site for a daily news publication, where the people filing stories are journalists rather than engineers.
    • Kept the site up and quick through the traffic spikes that follow a breaking story.
    • Three years of shipping to a live audience on someone else's deadline. It is where the habits came from.
    • Web Development
    • PHP
    • JavaScript
    • MySQL

The detail behind these roles is in the products.