Before he became the engineer founders call when they need something live in production by Monday, Kelechi Oliver Azorji was soldering wires and debugging microcontrollers. His world was sensors, PCBs, GPS units, and car-tracking modules, not Figma files, stand-ups, or product roadmaps.
“I started out on the hardware side,” he says. “I was closer to oscilloscopes than user interfaces. But even then, I knew someone had to build the layer humans actually touch.”
That realisation hit him while working on a vehicle-tracking system. The hardware worked, the device could collect and transmit location data, but there was no interface for users to see it. So he built one. A scrappy web app, wired directly into a device he’d programmed himself.
The day the map updated in real time was the moment everything shifted.
“Seeing data from something I built in my hands show up instantly on a screen… that changed my brain chemistry,” he laughs. “That was the moment I understood: the magic is not hardware or software, it’s the connection between both.”
Today, that connection defines his career. Kelechi is a Senior Full-Stack Engineer and Cloud DevOps practitioner, and one of the quiet operators behind several African startups that need to move fast without breaking everything.
Learning rigour at startup speed
Kelechi’s move from embedded systems into full-stack engineering wasn’t a lucky pivot. It was a deliberate grind as he went through an Andela Bootcamp Cycle 45 and coding challenge, the infamous rite of passage that has shaped hundreds of top African engineers.
“Andela forces discipline into your bloodstream,” he recalls. “You write code all day, someone tears it apart, you fix it, and repeat. It teaches you structure. It teaches you to defend your decisions. It teaches you to communicate like your job depends on it, because it actually does.”
In his instructor’s words, “we do not train you to work for Andela, we’re training you to excel globally as a professional, and that discipline became the backbone of how he works in early-stage teams. Startups, after all, are built on imbalance: more ambition than people, more ideas than infrastructure.
“In a startup, there’s no such thing as ‘that’s not my job, ’” he says. “You pick up the frontend, the backend, the DevOps, the migrations, the dashboards, the 2 AM alerts, everything. Someone has to push the tech from the bottom.”
It’s a philosophy he repeats often. Founders pitch and raise; engineers like Kelechi catch the pitch and turn it into something users can actually touch.
Full stack plus the cloud
On paper, Kelechi is a full-stack engineer and cloud DevOps specialist. In reality, he is an engineer who can follow an idea from a Figma file to a production-ready deployment, and still hang around to babysit the infrastructure.
“My sweet spot is turning messy ideas into something stable that runs in the cloud without draining the runway,” he explains. “I think about the database, the API, the UX, and the AWS bill, all at the same time.”
His AWS certifications aren’t for decoration. They reflect years of making cloud decisions where one wrong choice could wipe out a young company’s burn rate. “I’ve worked on projects where the difference between two AWS services was the difference between surviving the quarter… or not,” he says. “You learn to design for survival first, scale second.”
That combination, full-stack + cloud pragmatism, is why founders trust him when timelines shrink and expectations spike.
Building under pressure
Across multiple startups, Kelechi has built products in conditions that would break most senior engineers. Idea today, demo next week, customers next month. No excuses.
“Startups are controlled chaos,” he says. “The strategy might change every week, but the code cannot collapse just because the plan did.”
His career reads like a series of sprints through fintech, logistics, internal tools, and consumer apps. Different sectors, same pattern: take a raw concept, build Version 1, get real users, stabilise, repeat. “The question is always: what can we ship quickly that solves a real problem — without creating bigger problems in production?”
That’s why he leans heavily into DevOps. CI pipelines, monitoring dashboards, automated deployments, logs that mean something, the unglamorous work that keeps small engineering teams from drowning. “If it can’t be deployed easily or monitored properly, it will blow up later,” he says. “Startups do not need extra surprises.”
Ethics inside tight constraints
Despite working in pressure-heavy environments, Kelechi maintains an old-school respect for ethics. Code matters. Cost matters. But so does trust. “Even as a five-person startup, you’re touching people’s money, identity, movement,” he says. “You can’t pretend ethical responsibility doesn’t apply to you.”
So he designs with intention: what data should exist, where it should be stored, how long it should live, and when to push back on “cool” features that violate user trust. “In Africa, people are still learning to trust digital systems,” he explains. “If we cut corners early, we pay for it as an ecosystem.”
It’s a point many founders overlook, but one he refuses to compromise on.
The archetype of a first ten hire
Across Africa’s startup ecosystem, the profile of the ideal early engineer is changing. Startups want someone who can code, architect, deploy, debug, and still speak about products. Someone who reduces unknowns.
Kelechi is exactly that archetype. He writes frontend code that respects design constraints, backend services that scale cleanly, and infrastructure that keeps operational costs sane. He is the person in the room who can say, “I’ve seen this before, here’s how to build it without breaking ourselves.”
His story also hints at where African engineering is headed: a generation of operators who are multi-disciplinary, cloud-literate, and capable of building products in one city but scaling them across a continent.
“I like connecting the dots,” he says. “From the device on the table to the cloud in the background to the user on their phone.”
In that space between vision and execution, Kelechi keeps doing what he has always done: quietly pushing the tech from the bottom so African startups can stand tall at the top.
