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Kwesi Dadson
Senior Back-End Engineer
10 years building distributed systems in fintech and financial services. From real-time fraud detection for UK banks to USSD banking infrastructure serving underserved markets across Africa. I care about systems that are reliable, observable, and built to last.
I'm a back-end engineer based in Tema, Ghana. I've spent the last decade working across the stack but my home is in backend systems — designing APIs, building event-driven microservices, and making sure things don't break at 2am. I've worked in fintech, hedge fund infrastructure, and payments, mostly in high-stakes environments where correctness matters as much as speed.
Outside of work, I co-founded Slightly Techie, a tech talent network helping developers across Ghana go from tutorials to production. I write about backend engineering on Medium, and I'm always building something on the side.
Embedded at international fintech and financial services clients, working on security-critical systems requiring fintech-grade reliability.
- Designed backend services for a real-time fraud detection platform serving major UK banks (Kotlin/gRPC, Temporal, Python, TypeScript/GraphQL)
- Architected Facebook Marketplace scam detection end-to-end — data service API, event-driven risk indicators, and investigation UI
- Replaced log-based metrics with OpenTelemetry instrumentation; built synthetic monitoring for production services
- Led migration of third-party integrations to Kotlin v2 architecture
- Platform engineering for one of the world's largest macro hedge funds — infrastructure, DevOps pipelines, and tooling for trading systems
- Owned CI/CD pipelines, Terraform IaC, and production reliability at institutional scale
- Delivered production backend software for global clients through Africa's leading remote engineering network
- Embedded at Groove (Clari) building customer success tooling across distributed teams
- Translated user feedback into backend improvements improving client outcomes and system reliability
- Backend systems for pension and trust management — financial products, compliance, data integrity
- Lead developer on CRM serving 500,000+ customers across institutional clients
- Built a USSD application that became a primary fund collection channel
- Built USSD banking applications from scratch for a major Ghanaian bank — zero-to-one for mobile-first populations
- End-to-end product delivery for financial institutions across emerging markets
GreenKhandl
Automated cryptocurrency trading platform. Executes trades on behalf of users with portfolio management and real-time dashboards.
Slightly Techie
Tech talent network and community connecting entrepreneurs with developers across Ghana. Includes a developer school program.
Fraud Detection Platform
Real-time payment fraud detection serving major UK banks. Event-driven architecture with risk indicator generation and investigation tooling.
USSD Banking
Built USSD banking and fund collection applications from scratch for financial institutions serving mobile-first populations in Ghana.
I'm always open to interesting conversations and opportunities. Drop me a line.