There is a group of people in every financial technology company that you rarely hear about until something breaks. If you waited 20 months to watch the season finale of a particular dragon show in 2019, then you already have an idea who these people are. But if you don’t, let me tell you about Moniepoint’s Site Reliability Engineering team.

The men of Moniepoint’s ‘Night Watch’

Moniepoint’s Site Reliability Engineering team are the in-house “firefighters” who stay alert at all times, ensuring you can transfer money at 2 AM or make a withdrawal on Sunday morning.

The member of the Night’s Watch I have the honour of speaking with today is Chinonso of Moniepoint. Guardian of Uptime, First of His Name, Keeper of Alerts, Watcher of Core Systems, Firefighter of Black Mondays, and Shield Against Downtime.

Chinonso now leads the watch/team, but when he joined Moniepoint three years ago, he was fresh off the technical support queue. “My first role was helping businesses, customer support, and internal clients resolve technical payment and service issues,” he says.

Today, he oversees the reliability of Moniepoint’s core banking application (CBA), Central Notification and Authentication System, ensuring it remains stable, safe, and ready for any event, whether it is a product launch, a national holiday rush, or a sudden spike in load that nobody saw coming.

The system and its fire alarms

Explaining his role to a non-initiate like me, Chinonso offers a metaphor. “Imagine a building with all the lights on. Our job is making sure that what is bright is light and not fire.” That building houses the core systems that power Moniepoint’s banking engine, including infrastructure, notifications, and transactions. And when something is off, when metrics like transaction success rates dip or latency spikes, they are the first to know and the first to act.

“We don’t have to fix everything ourselves, but we know when to raise the alarm and call for backups. We mobilise the leads, the engineering head and the business leaders. It is like a controlled emergency response.”

Site Reliability Engineering reminds me of the classical saying that “those whom God wishes to destroy, he first drives mad.” The way I think about it is, before a system breaks, it trembles. And if you are listening closely enough, and you are Chinonso and his team, you will hear it.

These signs do not come with sirens. They come in silence. A blinking dot. A percentage that drops by a decimal. An anomaly that could mean everything or nothing at all. Chinonso’s team is built for this early tension. They live in dashboards, logs, synthetic monitors and most importantly, metrics. The metric may be a number. That number could be 180. That is the baseline, the sweet spot where a particular service performs optimally. It could be a success rate, a count of active threads, or a latency threshold. Whatever it is, the team knows it. They memorise it.

“So when that number drops to 179, then 175, you know something is shifting,” Chinonso says. “Not broken yet. But off.”

And when that happens, the team moves. Sometimes, it's a quick fix: scale up capacity, restart a node, or alert another team. Other times, it is triage. Trace dependencies. Examine logs. Recreate scenarios because the scariest incidents do not come loud. They come quietly, masked as minor fluctuations.

The scale and stretch of the Watch

Chinonso did not just land in Site Reliability Engineering. He built his way in after joining Moniepoint in 2022.

When the CBA team needed an SRE unit, he was tasked with creating it from scratch. His prior experience as a Finacle CBA Engineer came in handy, but this was still a new world for him. He trained. Shadowed. Asked questions. “The shift from tech support to SRE felt huge,” he says. “But Moniepoint gave me the space to grow.”

Chinonso has had more than his fair share of incidents. Those long nights and pressure-cooker moments that only SREs truly understand. I won't get into specifics, but let's do a mental calculation of all the major Moniepoint updates between 2022 and now.

Since December 2022, we have quietly but steadily expanded the tools that power everyday business and banking. It began with moving beyond just helping companies collect payments to enabling everyday people to spend, save, and manage their money. We launched a personal banking app with transfers, airtime, bills, and a Moniepoint debit card that actually works. Then came the little things that matter. Faster dispute resolution for failed transfers. Gamified rewards where users’ weekly transactions could win them millions during our sponsorship of Big Brother Naija. All-in-one POS machines that do not just collect payments but also help small business owners track their stock and balance their books.

More recently, we crossed the ocean with MonieWorld, our diaspora-focused financial service that helps people abroad send money to Nigeria in seconds, with zero fees and rates that actually make sense. From payments to cards to diaspora banking, Moniepoint’s product line has evolved in one direction. Financial happiness for every African, everywhere.

Chinonso and his team are part of the reason this works. They keep the systems running when traffic surges. They ensure the platform stays fast and stable when it matters most. In a country where reliability is rare, they help make Moniepoint the exception.

As you can rightly infer, sometimes the spark does not show up in time. And sometimes the system does not whisper, it sings a Usher verse. Even Merlin would need double shoulders if he were to carry the weight of over 10 million businesses and individuals. At Moniepoint, the SRE carries it well.

There is a running joke in Chinonso’s team. “If an incident occurs on a Monday, brace for the week because an incident will occur again.” They call it the Black Monday jinx. However, even in challenging moments, a steady current of camaraderie remains. His team works remotely, but they have formed a bond that does not depend on office walls, and a culture of excellence ensures the optimal uptime and speed Moniepoint is known for, both at home and abroad.

The mix of tech fires and sand

Chinonso does not spend all his days or nights watching and solving incidents. He guides junior engineers, writes protocols for reliability, and assists other teams in building safer systems. He is also learning to lead in a world where you rarely see your team’s faces.

That was the version of Chinonso I first encountered, not in a war room or a Zoom call, but through his volunteering with Camp Adventure Africa, a community program that runs three outreach camps each year. His favourite is the Easter camp, and it was also the one that first caught my attention. He tells me he grew up constantly surrounded by peers his own age, his age grade, an essential part of Nigerian communal life where groups of similarly aged people are bonded through shared responsibilities. From as early as he could remember, whenever something needed to be done, his age grade would be called upon, or he would volunteer eagerly.

He recalls the tradition of sanitation days, celebrated across many Nigerian states, where communities come together to clean their streets and public spaces collectively. Chinonso and his friends would take part, not only picking up debris but also ensuring it was properly recycled or disposed of. This early immersion in collective effort and leadership left a lasting mark on him. In fact, there is a humorous Yoruba term used to describe people’s age grades based on their volunteering style, KponKpon, which loosely translates to willing and strong labourers. It is a testament to how deeply embedded this culture of service is. So when opportunities to volunteer arose in church or elsewhere, Chinonso never hesitated.

Working remotely at Moniepoint also enables him to demonstrate leadership and empathy outside of the typical high-pressure environment of engineering. When I asked if Camp Adventure Africa was his first time volunteering, he said, “I have always loved volunteering, from church to community work.”

As a way to continue this lifelong habit of service, he joined the Rotary Foundation, where he hopes to keep making an impact beyond his day-to-day work.

A game of metrics

Ask Chinonso to describe himself, and he will smile before choosing two words: unpredictable and adaptable.

Not many people I know can do what Chinonso does. The kind of clarity and discipline to treat numbers not just as data but as warning signs. The only “180” some people will ever care about is the difference between Celsius and Fahrenheit.

Something is not quite right. You pause. You trace it. You try to fix it before it becomes public, loud, and irreversible. In this way, I can relate to the Night’s Watch.

That is why I respect Chinonso’s work so deeply. He does not just fight fires. He sees the smoke before most of us even smell it.

Think you’ve got the grit for the Wall? Join the builders, watchers, and quiet defenders shaping financial happiness for millions. Explore open roles at Moniepoint on our careers page.