Kofi E. Ampaabeng

About

I’m the “can-do” engineer-leader — hand me the new, undefined problem, especially one in a field nobody’s mapped or with the obvious tools off the table. I learn it, and I ship it.

Walk into unfamiliar, constrained territory, do the real work, leave a system that holds up, and build the team that keeps it running.

I started as an economist. The PhD taught me to reason about measurement — what the data actually lets you claim — and the measurements I needed usually didn’t exist yet. So I learned to build them, then to build the teams that could: at Mercatus I directed the Open Health Policy program and shipped HealthRegData on ML models we trained ourselves; I architected RegAuth to render the full U.S. federal legal corpus as structured data — years before LLMs could do it. Economist to AI leader, one problem at a time.

Since then I’ve led teams and shipped products across regulated banking, data platforms, and applied ML — a core-banking and regulatory platform live for banks across Ghana and South Africa, an IFRS-first ledger where every posting is immutable, three teams built from scratch. The domains change; the method doesn’t — and underneath every one of them, a problem-solver who learns.

20+
Years shipping
3
Teams built from scratch
4
Client countries
PhD
Economics

01   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 mandate — bill → law → code → regulation → register → rulings — so I built the system that renders that whole lineage as queryable data, then added the quantification I needed.

See the work

Vigil

My answer to a question I couldn’t stop asking: how is social media shaping elections, especially in Ghana?

See the work

SYNCopated

I knew how an online piano lesson should feel, and nothing did. So I built it.

See the work

rss-next

I rebuilt it out of frustration with the thing it replaced.

See the work

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 is the point: a curious person solving his own problems to a standard he’d accept.

02   How I work

Governance is the architecture, not the paperwork.

ADRs gate decisions before they harden into folk memory; every change carries a ticket and a test; audit trails are append-only. I treat engineering standards the way a bank treats controls.

AI inside controls it can’t bypass.

The model writes the code and opens the merge request; a compliance engine blocks the merge on any violation. Speed without surrendering control — the same discipline a regulated transaction gets.

Architect to the numbers.

Cloud-native or self-hosted, the budget and the business indicators decide — not the trend.

03   Career

  1. Founder & Principal Engineer / Architect

    2024 – Present

    Cape Wesley

    Regulated banking, IAM, ML & mobile portfolio. Hired and built a globally distributed team (Ghana, Rwanda, US) serving clients across South Africa, Ghana, Pakistan, and the US.

  2. Senior Backend Engineer

    2022 – Present

    ECS — USPS Change-of-Address

    Technical owner of a national-scale federal system (cleared). Led a WebSphere→WildFly migration with no prior experience in either; built a custom queue when Kafka/ActiveMQ were barred; re-architected auth to a BFF model.

  3. Co-Founder & Executive Director

    2019 – 2024

    Excenit (fintech startup)

    Built the RSS regulatory & core-banking platform and a banking client base across Ghana and South Africa from zero. Subsumed into Cape Wesley.

  4. Senior Research Fellow & Director, Open Health Policy

    2019 – 2023

    Mercatus Center, George Mason University

    Built the HealthRegData product and a team of research scholars; built the data-science team and the RegCensus data platform/API.

  5. Research Associate / Task Lead

    2013 – 2019

    IMPAQ International

    Designed technical-solution architectures for U.S. DOL/USDA federal data systems.

  6. Banking & Software (Infrastructure Manager, DBA, Sr. Developer)

    2003 – 2007

    Fidelity Bank · Agricultural Development Bank · Bsystems — Ghana

    Oracle infrastructure and core-banking rollouts; led full-SDLC delivery of a financial asset-management system for Ghana's largest insurer.

Full résumé and publications on the Recognition page.