Senior Software Engineer · R&D / Innovation at PurpleWave
I build distributed systems
that turn hard problems into
products people use.
I'm Kofi Gyimah Samuel, a backend-leaning engineer with 5+ years shipping production systems across backend, web, mobile, cloud and AI. Today I work with PurpleWave's executive team to research, prototype and validate what gets built next.
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- Years shipping production systems
- 5+
- App downloads in the first 3 days at Ownkey
- 5K
- Records served in under 3 seconds
- 10K+
- Engineers led and mentored at AyaData
- 7
About
I like the space between a whiteboard idea and a system that holds up in production. That's where most of my work happens.
My strengths are in distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architecture and cloud-native engineering. I've led teams, co-founded a proptech company, and built 0-to-1 products in mental health, agriculture, medical imaging, real estate and auctions.
On PurpleWave's R&D / Innovation team I partner directly with the CEO and senior engineers. We research emerging technology, test product ideas for technical feasibility, and build prototypes before the company commits to a full build. I also own end-to-end delivery of the CRM and sales tools that territory managers use every day.
Experience
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Senior Software Engineer, R&D / Innovation @ PurpleWave Auction
I help decide what PurpleWave builds next. On the R&D / Innovation team I work directly with the CEO to explore emerging technology, pressure-test product ideas and prototype them before the company commits. I also own engineering end to end across the auction platform and enterprise CRM.
- Designed and built My Territory, which lets regional managers map client routes, plan daily activity, and track territory ownership and coverage.
- Built an event-driven business-card ingestion pipeline that creates companies and contacts automatically, cutting manual CRM data entry.
- Built a company deduplication and search engine that matches external EDA sources against CRM data so sales can find and merge duplicates.
- Optimized action-item workflows to serve 10,000+ records in under 3 seconds.
- Build prototypes and proofs of concept that validate product hypotheses before full-scale investment.
-
Co-Founder & Technical Lead @ Ownkey Real Estate
Co-founded the company and led its engineering: architecture, backend, infrastructure and technical direction for a real-estate technology platform.
- Architected Rust and Go microservices for listings, developments, appointments, client services and agent matching.
- Built a matching system that connects clients with agents based on property requirements and preferences.
- Shipped a 3D virtual-tour platform for immersive property showcases.
- The mobile app reached 5,000 downloads in its first 3 days.
-
Full-Stack Engineer / Technical Lead @ TellMonifa
Technical lead for a privacy-first digital mental-health platform, owning architecture and delivery across backend, web, mobile and infra.
- Built real-time video conferencing for therapy sessions on web and mobile with Agora.
- Designed a personalized therapist-matching algorithm.
- Set up AWS CI/CD and Cloudflare security hardening to protect sensitive user data.
-
Senior Backend Engineer / Technical Lead @ AyaData / AyaGrow
Worked on AyaGrow, an AI-driven farm-management platform for enterprise palm-plantation operators, and led AyaData's internal platforms.
- Built data-heavy Angular interfaces with real-time farm data, GIS and AI insights.
- Architected and led the internal Employee Management System.
- Standardized Docker workflows, CI/CD and Datadog observability.
- Mentored and led a 7-person cross-functional team.
-
Software Engineer, AI / Data Platforms @ Enterprise Computing Ltd
- Built an AI-assisted medical-imaging platform that grades diabetic retinopathy severity, covering ingestion, preprocessing and inference.
- Built an annotation and labelling platform for curating ML training data at scale.
- Researched practical Generative AI integration for enterprise and financial systems.
-
Software Engineer @ Wookein Group
Built backend services, REST APIs and frontends for several production client projects, and added monitoring that improved reliability.
-
Frontend Engineer @ Fast Pass Ticketing
Built responsive interfaces and Stripe checkout for a high-traffic ticketing platform, and cut checkout transaction errors.
Stack
Languages
- Go
- Rust
- Python
- Java
- TypeScript
- PHP
Backend & systems
- Microservices
- Event-driven
- Kafka
- RabbitMQ
- gRPC
- GraphQL
- REST
- System design
Cloud & infra
- AWS
- GCP
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- CI/CD
- GitHub Actions
Data & search
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- MongoDB
- Redis
- Elasticsearch
Frontend & mobile
- React
- Next.js
- Angular
- Vue
- Flutter
- React Native
Observability & security
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- OpenTelemetry
- Datadog
- ELK
- PostHog
- OAuth2
- JWT
- OWASP
Have something worth building?
I'm happy to talk about engineering roles, R&D collaborations or a hard problem you're stuck on. Email gets the fastest reply.
gyimahkofisam@gmail.com