Case study · Payments · 2021 – 2025
Closer to the money,
every year.
Three and a half years at Squad, the payment gateway from GTCO's HabariPay. I started on a monitoring dashboard and kept being trusted with work nearer to where real money moves.
- Role
- Frontend Engineer · promoted in 2025
- Team
- Squad engineering · Payments team from 2023
- Timeline
- Dec 2021 – Jul 2025
- Stack
- React, TypeScript, Tailwind, Vite
At a glance
Built · monitoring, POS systems and checkout work for a payments company, from before its launch.
But · in payments, a wrong screen can send real money to the wrong place.
In the end · each year brought work closer to the money, then a promotion in June 2025.
Before launch.
Squad is HabariPay's payment gateway, part of GTCO, and today it's trusted by businesses in Nigeria. I joined as a frontend engineer in December 2021, before it launched.
Over the next three and a half years, the work that came my way kept moving nearer to the money.
Real money, real places.
In payments, the dashboards are where decisions get made. Staff use them to decide who gets a terminal, how its card payments are processed and when a merchant gets paid. A wrong value doesn't just look bad; it sends real money to the wrong place.
So every screen had to match the payment services underneath it exactly.
Three habits.
Make failure visible first.
Airtime and data were Squad's first products, but the team couldn't easily tell when a provider was down. My first build was a dashboard of transaction activity, service health and provider performance, so problems surfaced far earlier.note 1
Model the whole lifecycle.
A terminal isn't one screen. It's requested, set up, switched on, watched and eventually switched off. I built each step to mirror the payment services behind it, so what staff saw was what the system did.note 2
Leave a better base.
With the team, I moved the admin dashboard to Vite, TypeScript and Tailwind, and helped build the second version of Squad's website.
Closer to the money.
No single day changed things. Each year, the work that came to me sat one ring nearer to where the money moves.
Watching the money.
My first build was a monitoring dashboard for airtime and data, so the team could see when a provider was down.
Taking payments on phones.
Squad POS began on phones that read cards over NFC. I built the frontend around it, from the tools the team used to run it to the screens merchants saw.
Every checkout.
When the checkout's long-time maintainer moved on, its work came to me, and I joined the Payments team. I added new ways to pay, like OPay.
A national public offer.
I led the frontend of the GTCO public offer web app, built so people outside GTBank could invest from their phones. It has its own book.
Terminals in the field.
When Squad moved to physical terminals, I built the systems around them: admin tools for the fleet, a merchant dashboard with its own payment step, and a dashboard for account managers.
The centre.
Promoted, a month before I moved on.
Still how it runs.
- POS systems: admin, merchants, account managers
- 3
The POS systems I built are still how HabariPay and its merchants run Squad POS today.note 3
What I took with me.
My first build didn't move money. It watched it. Doing that well is what put the next, bigger thing in my hands.
I still start new work the same way, by understanding the system before I build on it. At ama, I learned how the backend scored candidates before I built the screens for it.
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GTCO · Fintech · 2024$274,965 in four weeks. Zero downtime.Read the case study →Let's talk
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