Kofi E. Ampaabeng

About

I’m the “can-do” engineer-leader— the one you hand the new, undefined problem to, especially when it’s in a field nobody’s done before or the obvious tools are off the table. I learn it and ship it. The breadth in my work isn’t dilution; it’s one discipline applied at every layer: walk into unfamiliar, constrained territory, do the real work, leave a system that holds up, and build the team that keeps it running.

I have a PhD in economics, so I reason about measurement — what data actually lets you claim — and I turn that into data products. Then I take the same rigor to the metal: I co-founded a fintech that put a core-banking and regulatory platform into production for banks across Ghana and South Africa; I architected RegAuth, one of the only systems that renders the full U.S. federal legal corpus as structured data; and I architected an IFRS-first, multi-tenant banking ledger where every posting is immutable and auditable.

I work end-to-end — concept, architecture, team-building, leadership, and client management — and I architect to fit the budget and the business indicators, cloud-native (Azure/AWS) or self-hosted, whichever the numbers favor. My management approach is mentorship-led: I’ve built three teams from scratch and grown junior engineers and analysts into people who ship hard things.

Why I build

I build products I want to use. I’m the first user of everything here, and most of it started as my own problem.

  • RegAuth— I wanted to understand how a regulatory agency’s structure shapes how it regulates. The honest way to trace that runs through the agency’s mandate — bill → law → code → regulation → register → rulings — so I built the system that renders that whole lineage as queryable data, then added the quantification and analytics I actually needed.
  • Vigil— my answer to a question I couldn’t stop asking: how is social media shaping elections, especially in Ghana?
  • SYNCopated — I knew how an online piano lesson should feel, and nothing did. So I built it.
  • rss-next — I rebuilt it out of frustration with the thing it replaced.

Being the first audience is the whole method. It’s why I don’t ship half-measures — I have to live with them tomorrow. It’s why governance and getting it right come first — because I care, not because someone filed a ticket. The range isn’t a strategy; it’s a curious person solving his own problems to a standard he’d accept.

How I work

Career

Full résumé and publications on the Recognition page.