Case study 03 · Recommend

From WhatsApp threadsto a platform of its own.

Role

Engineering Lead

Timeline

Aug 2024 — Nov 2025

Team

3 engineers, led by me

Stack

NestJS · TypeScript · PostgreSQL · TypeORM · Next.js · Socket.IO · OpenAI · Paystack

engineers on the team I led

role tiers in the access-control model

All

repositories on automated CI/CD

Live

in-app chat and purchasing over WebSockets

The situation

Recommend connects customers, riders, vendors and distributors. Its conversations and purchases started out in WhatsApp — quick to launch, but living outside the product.

As Engineering Lead I owned the architecture and implementation across web, backend and bot systems, while also being the team's backend engineer — and led the move into Recommend's own real-time application.

Platform architecture

Simplified

1 · WhatsApp thread

where it started

2 · Recommend app

Next.js

3 · Socket.IO gateway

real-time chat & purchasing

4 · NestJS API

auth · RBAC · Paystack

5 · PostgreSQL

TypeORM

What I changed

01
Technical leadership
Problem
Web, backend and bot services, built by a small team, needed one coherent architecture.
Result
Owned the architecture and set reusable patterns for development and deployment across all repositories.
02
Real-time platform
Problem
Customer conversations and purchases lived in WhatsApp, outside the product.
Result
Designed a WebSocket / Socket.IO communication system that moved conversations and purchasing into Recommend's own app.
03
Data & delivery
Problem
Release friction slowed delivery, and one data model had to serve customers, riders, vendors and admins.
Result
Designed and optimised the PostgreSQL schema via TypeORM; CI/CD across repositories automated build and deploy.
04
AI service bot
Problem
A generic LLM gives confident, wrong answers to prospective clients.
Result
Integrated OpenAI and tuned it on proprietary business knowledge to eliminate hallucinations.
05
Auth, access & payments
Problem
Many kinds of user need very different powers over the same data and money.
Result
Email/password and Google OAuth, granular RBAC (Super Admin, tiered Admins, Vendors, Distributors), and Paystack platform-wide.

What I learned

“Leading a small team is mostly about removing decisions: when the patterns are clear, everyone ships faster and reviews become about the product, not the plumbing.”

Next case study

Velofi — Backend Software Engineer

From WhatsApp threadsto a platform of its own.

Platform architecture

Technical leadership

Real-time platform

Data & delivery

AI service bot

Auth, access & payments