👋 I'm Obinna Bernard Ofoegbu (professionally known as Bernard) 😄 👋
I'm a Site Reliability, Observability & Automation Engineer, working at the intersection of financial infrastructure and system reliability. Today that means keeping mobile banking, USSD, and agency banking systems honest at a licensed Nigerian commercial bank — where "it's down" isn't an inconvenience, it's someone's money stuck mid-transaction.
Reliable = Successful Transactions / (Total Attempts − Customer-Induced − Third-Party-Induced − Unclassified Errors)
That formula is how I think about uptime — not as a percentage on a dashboard, but as a claim you have to be able to defend.
I came up as a Frontend-Heavy Full-Stack Engineer, and that foundation still shows — I ship product, not just dashboards. But the center of gravity has shifted: instrumenting systems, building the dashboards that tell the truth about them, and automating the response so the system notices before the customer does.
SRE & Incident Response — instrumenting, monitoring, and triaging financial transaction systems where failure has a currency attached to it.
Observability Engineering — Grafana dashboards and OpenTelemetry pipelines for things like database cluster replication (Always On Availability Groups) and investment platform reliability, built for people who don't want to read a graph to understand if something's wrong.
Automation Engineering — turning "someone noticed the outage" into "the system noticed and told us first." Auto-recovery tooling, staleness detection, alerting that doesn't cry wolf.
Full-Stack Engineering — React.js, Next.js, TypeScript, Node.js, PostgreSQL. Still where I came from, still how I ship.
I've carried this across fintech, edtech, e-commerce, and mobility — cross-border payment systems, university operations automation, high-volume e-commerce platforms, and ride-delivery infrastructure — with the throughline always being: make the system trustworthy, then make it fast.
The SRE lens doesn't replace the builder — it sharpens it. I still take on frontend and full-stack roles and side gigs, and the reliability instincts travel with me: I design for the failure states, not just the happy path.
Recent full-stack builds:
VaultCircle — a group savings/savings-circle platform (Next.js 15 PWA, Express + TypeScript, PostgreSQL via Prisma, JWT auth, Zustand state management), shipped end-to-end from data model to deployed UI.
Saakwa — a laundry pickup/delivery marketplace, built as a pnpm monorepo, currently integrating Paystack payments, payout splitting, and Twilio notifications.
pay-by-transfer — bank transfer payment tooling for African businesses, built to cut gateway fees for merchants.
What I bring to a frontend/full-stack role:
Pixel-level UI craft in React.js, Next.js, and TypeScript, paired with the backend chops to own the full request lifecycle — API design, database schema, auth, deployment — not just consume an API someone else built.
An SRE's eye for the parts most frontend engineers skip: loading states, retry logic, error boundaries, and telemetry that tells you what actually broke in production.
Comfort moving fast on scoped, deadline-driven builds — VaultCircle went from spec to a working, deployed product as a timed hiring submission.
Money is just data. Banking is state synchronization. Downtime is a financial problem before it's an engineering problem. If a system isn't observable, it isn't reliable — it's just lucky, temporarily.
I'm currently deepening my OpenTelemetry JS contributions toward CNCF maintainer status, and building KudiTrace, an AI SRE agent for African financial infrastructure — the natural next step from watching dashboards to building the thing that watches them for you.
Outside work, I enjoy building products that solve practical business problems—from financial infrastructure to SME operations and digital services.
📖 Core stack, plus what I'm actively learning: