At 3:00 AM on December 7, 2023, Bank of America’s mobile and online banking platforms suddenly went dark. Customers couldn’t log in, payments stalled, and support lines were flooded. By dawn, the failure had escalated; millions of users were locked out of their accounts, payrolls were delayed, and card transactions were declining nationwide. The cause? A backend system upgrade had triggered a cascading failure in the bank’s core processing engine, a misstep that cost the bank millions in lost transactions, customer trust, and regulatory scrutiny.
This isn’t an isolated case. In July 2018, British Airways was forced to cancel over 400 flights due to a backend infrastructure failure; a single point of failure in their data centre caused their check-in, booking, and flight operations systems to crash globally. The downtime cost them an estimated $100 million in compensation and fines. And more recently, in 2022, Slack, the workplace messaging platform, suffered a five-hour global outage traced to an overloaded database shard, revealing how backend scaling issues can bring even the most modern systems to their knees.
The reality is, our digital world is running on an increasingly fragile web of backend systems, and we’re pushing them to their limits. From mobile banking to ride-hailing apps, nearly every service we use relies on a complex network of backend infrastructure to function. But most companies aren’t building to handle scale, concurrency, or failure. According to Gartner, by 2026, 60% of digital businesses will experience major service outages due to backend mismanagement, not because of bad ideas, but because of brittle, unscalable systems under the hood.
In Africa, the consequences are amplified. The GSMA reports that sub-Saharan Africa lost $120 billion in productivity in 2023 alone due to disruptions in digital services. From payment gateways timing out during peak hours to healthcare APIs failing mid-consultation, the lack of resilient backend engineering is stalling innovation. As internet penetration accelerates and mobile-first platforms expand, the cost of failure is becoming existential. Without rock-solid backend infrastructure, African startups and global companies operating on the continent are building on sand. A recent report from Check Point reveals that Africa saw a 20% rise in weekly cyberattacks per organisation in Q1 2024, with insecure backend systems being the most common entry point. Today, the need for scalable, secure, and observable backend systems has never been more urgent.
Backend engineers are recognised as the architects of digital stability. They are advocating for a fundamental shift: designing resilient infrastructure at the core of product development, not patching failures after they erupt. In an industry where even seconds of downtime can cost millions, this proactive philosophy is becoming non-negotiable.
Ijeoma Eti, the engineer designing backends that don’t crack under pressure
With a background in Industrial Chemistry, Ijeoma made an unconventional leap into software engineering and has since become a leading force in building scalable backend systems for leading tech companies in the fintech, edtech, and logistics space. Her work focuses on solving the invisible but critical problem behind every successful digital product: infrastructure that works reliably at scale.
Ijeoma’s engineering philosophy is: resilience must be built in from the start. Her systems are guided by three core principles: modularity for adaptability, fault tolerance for continuous uptime, and observability for real-time insight and proactive debugging. Whether it’s safeguarding sensitive user data in fintech applications or maintaining operational continuity for logistics platforms serving thousands, Ijeoma designs with durability in mind. She has contributed to infrastructure that powers systems used by millions, bringing deep backend expertise to every project. Previously at Kafene, At Kafene, Ijeoma played a key role in developing backend systems that supported alternative lease-to-own financing for underserved communities in the U.S., ensuring secure, scalable access to credit. For her role at Manufactured, she’s worked on the backend infrastructure that powers inventory management and supply chain operations for global brands, systems that must remain robust even under intense load and cross-border complexity.
Ijeoma is also a maintainer on Layer5 Meshery, a flagship open-source project in the cloud-native space. She’s also contributed to widely used projects like Trix and OpenCollective-Frontend, platforms that help shape the future of developer tooling and community infrastructure. Through her open-source work, Ijeoma has collaborated with engineers around the world to ship features that power mission-critical applications used by millions.
Beyond these roles, Ijeoma is an active mentor, public speaker, and advocate for better engineering standards across the world’s growing tech ecosystems. She consistently champions the importance of robust backend infrastructure, emphasising that without reliable systems, even the most innovative applications are destined to fail. Through mentorship programs, conference talks, and open-source contributions, she’s helping shape a future where global companies can build with stability and scale in mind. She has been invited to speak at some of Africa’s biggest tech conferences like API Conference, Open Source Community Africa Conference, among many others. Also using education to drive technical knowledge, she is a mentor with Women Techmakers Asaba, Black Girls in Tech, Google Developer Group etc. As AI, edge computing, and distributed systems reshape the ecosystem, engineers like Ijeoma will be the ones ensuring innovation doesn’t outpace reliability.
