About

From Assembly Language to AI agents, by way of six years in production.

My first “Hello, World” compiled in 2012, and I immediately wanted to know what happened underneath it. That question took me down through C to Assembly, and I loved it down there — registers, stack frames, the machine actually doing the work. Then back up to the web, where Python and JavaScript became the languages I’ve built in ever since. Stroustrup’s The C++ Programming Language and The Zen of Python did the rest.

I studied Quantitative Finance at the University of Ghana and went into fintech to digitise financial platforms — the start of six years across fintech, enterprise systems and backend infrastructure.

I still build across the stack; what’s changed is where it points. Since 2025 I’ve been moving into AI — training and evaluating LLMs at Turing, now building the services behind agentic platforms at Emergence AI.

6 yrs
Shipping production
5 teams
Ghana → US, remote
$120K+
Losses prevented
Kobby Owen
Accra, Ghana
Kobby Owen at work
Kobby Owen speaking
Experience
2020 — present

Five teams, one throughline.

2025 —
Emergence AI
New York, USA
Senior Backend Engineer — AI Services & Platforms
Owned backend APIs, authentication and platform services; resolved critical production issues and added observability across AI infrastructure.
2025 —
Turing
California, USA
AI Software Engineer
Engineered scalable prompt-response pipelines in Python for large-scale LLM evaluations across 500K+ prompts. Built benchmarking systems to measure AI accuracy, latency, and reliability, and designed JSON-schema-based evaluation workflows for consistency validation.
2023–2024
Nebula
New York, USA
Senior Full Stack Engineer
Architected and maintained scalable databases and frontend systems for core services. Introduced Zustand state management and CI enforcement, while delivering AI-powered recruitment capabilities to improve candidate-job matching.
2022–2023
Akadenia
Idaho, USA
Full Stack Engineer
Improved UX and performance across client products, built Shopify admin tooling, and reduced infrastructure costs through AWS optimization and serverless adoption.
2020–2022
Nsano Fintech
Accra, Ghana
Full Stack Engineer
Built fraud detection and payment reconciliation systems, implemented USSD banking solutions, and supported fintech operations across African markets.
Stack
Languages
PythonTypeScriptJavaScriptC++
Frontend
ReactNext.jsReact NativeReduxZustand
Backend
FastAPIFlaskDjangoNode.jsExpress
AI & Data
LLMsMCPPydanticAIJSON SchemaNumPyPandasPrompt EngineeringBeautifulSoup
Cloud & DevOps
AWSAzureDockerRedisCeleryNginxGitHub Actions
Databases
PostgreSQLMySQLMongoDB
Now
Updated August 2026
Agentic platform services
Backend APIs, auth boundaries and observability for enterprise AI services at Emergence AI.
Writing monthly
A slow series on evaluation, payment rails and the infrastructure agents actually need.
Open source maintenance
json2obj, data-server and a Rust download manager — small, finished, documented.
Available for senior work
Contract or full-time. Distributed systems, fintech, and AI platform engineering.
Uses
EditorNeovim, VS Code
LanguagesPython, TypeScript
BackendFastAPI, Postgres, Redis
InfraAWS, Docker, Actions
ObservabilityOpenTelemetry, Grafana
CertificationAWS Cloud Practitioner