Open to opportunities

Testimony
Adekoya

Applied ML Engineer building production AI systems across computer vision, NLP, and optimization. Currently architecting decision intelligence platforms at DataBacked Africa and researching cultural robustness in generative vision models.

Now → Building FAUE — a fashion intelligence platform personalizing African style discovery and bespoke tailoring.
Testimony Adekoya — navy suit, arms crossed, dramatic studio portrait
Testimony Adekoya — navy suit, warm studio portrait
01 /About Me

Building AI at Africa's Frontier

I'm an Applied Machine Learning Engineer with 4+ years of experience shipping end-to-end ML systems in production — from data ingestion and model training to containerized deployment and monitoring on AWS, GCP, and Azure.

At DataBacked Africa, I'm architecting Intellign — a decision-intelligence platform combining genetic algorithm optimization with a conversational AI interface, serving healthcare, government, and education clients. Concurrently, I work as a Backend Engineer at Obscura Finance, deploying and monitoring privacy-preserving backend services for a crypto copy-trading platform.

As an independent researcher, I investigate cultural bias and robustness in generative vision models. My AfriVTON-Bench project benchmarks VTON models on African textile patterns. My MMIBC multimodal framework for breast cancer diagnosis won the Best Poster Award at DSN AI+ Bootcamp 2025 and is submitted to MIWAI 2026.

Active in the African AI ecosystem: two-time Deep Learning Indaba attendee, Travel Organizing Committee in Kigali, and former lead of a 100+ member AI chapter at FUNAAB.

4+
Years Exp.
6
Companies
2
Research Papers
DLI Attendee
02 /Work History

Experience

Four years of building, shipping, and learning — from queue detection models to decision-intelligence platforms, across six companies in three countries.

DataBacked Africa
Applied ML Engineer
Aug 2025 – Present Lagos, Nigeria

At DataBacked Africa, I'm leading the architecture of Intellign — a decision-intelligence platform where operators describe allocation goals in natural language and a genetic algorithm engine does the heavy lifting. The system processes 500+ resources against 750+ targets under competing constraints in minutes, streaming real-time progress as it works. Our first major deployment moved medical graduates into healthcare facilities — a months-long manual process, compressed to minutes. Human reviewers step in at the end: approve, adjust, export.

FastAPIGenetic AlgorithmsDecision IntelligenceSSEMLOpsPython
Obscura Finance
Backend Engineer
2025 – Present Remote

Running concurrently, I handle backend infrastructure at Obscura Finance — a crypto copy-trading platform built on a clear premise: trust should be cryptographic, not social. Traders prove performance without exposing strategies; followers subscribe based on verifiable results. My work keeps the services behind that promise alive — deployment pipelines, observability stacks, incident response, and the privacy-preserving verification layer built on Nillion and Horizen.

DevOpsBlockchainPrivacy TechMonitoringPython
Synthik Labs
Machine Learning Engineer
Oct 2025 – Dec 2025 Remote

At Synthik Labs, I built a synthetic data generation pipeline spanning tabular, text, and image modalities — parallelized LLM inference with schema enforcement, de-duplication, and multi-format export. Filecoin provenance tracking made every generated dataset reproducible and auditable. The kind of infrastructure that makes training data trustworthy at scale.

PyTorchFastAPICeleryRedisLLMsFilecoin
TAO AI
ML Engineer — Intern
May 2024 – Oct 2024 Lagos, Nigeria

At TAO AI, I adapted TinyLLaMA for African agricultural contexts on AWS SageMaker — fine-tuning the model then compressing it via knowledge distillation for resource-constrained edge deployment. The result was a production chatbot and credit scoring system that ran efficiently on hardware most ML deployments would refuse. My first real experience making language models genuinely useful in African settings.

TinyLLaMAAWS SageMakerLangchainDockerKnowledge Distillation
Rediones
ML Engineer — Contract
May 2023 – Sep 2024 Remote

At Rediones, I built a multimodal topic-generation model using CLIP and Hugging Face LLMs to extract content themes from video and audio streams — plus a TTS model with voice cloning for personalized audio. Both systems shipped to GCP via FastAPI. A formative stretch working with genuinely multimodal data at production scale.

CLIPTTS / Voice CloningGCPHuggingFaceFastAPI
Zummit Infolabs
Junior Data Scientist — Intern
Aug 2021 – Nov 2021 Remote

My first professional ML role. At Zummit Infolabs, I built real-time object detection pipelines — TensorFlow and OpenCV processing video streams to predict queue wait times and optimize customer flow. It established the foundation that everything since has built on.

TensorFlowOpenCVObject Detection
03 /Selected Work

Projects

Production systems and research prototypes spanning ML, computer vision, NLP, and backend engineering.

AfriVTON-Bench
Benchmark evaluating VTON model robustness on African textile patterns. Tests FASHN-VTON and LEFFA across 111 garments, 16 categories, 7 African countries. Submitted to Deep Learning Indaba 2026.
PyTorchHF DiffusersgLPIPS / gSSIMDLI 2026
SnapFeast AI
Meal ordering platform with facial recognition login (90% accuracy), personalized recommendation engine, and PostgreSQL-backed order management. Modular FastAPI backend deployed on HuggingFace Spaces.
FastAPIPyTorchOpenCVPostgreSQL
Thery AI
Telegram-deployed LLM virtual therapist using RAG with real-time emotion detection, adaptive therapeutic responses, mood-based music recommendations, and Redis-backed stateful conversation history.
LangchainRAGRedisHF Transformers
Verifacts
AI-powered fact-checking platform serving real-time claim verification via NLP evidence retrieval and classification. Deployed cross-platform as a Chrome extension and mobile application.
NLPFastAPIChrome ExtensionMobile App
04 /Publications

Research

Investigating cultural robustness in AI and accessible medical imaging for underrepresented communities.

AfriVTON-Bench: Evaluating the Robustness of Virtual Try-On Models to African Textile Patterns and Garment Structures

With Shiloh Oni

Benchmark exposing distribution-shift failures in VTON systems trained on Western fashion corpora. 111 African garment images across 16 categories, 7 countries, 5 sub-regions — paired with 15 diverse person model images for 1,012 evaluation pairs. Three systematic failure modes identified: pattern dissolution, drape collapse, and tonal drift — both architectures (FASHN-VTON, LEFFA) converge on near-identical garment distortion, pointing to the shared training distribution as root cause.

MMIBC: Explainable Multimodal Vision Transformer for Breast Cancer Diagnosis

Keywords: Computer Vision, Explainable AI, Mammography, Ultrasonography

Explainable multimodal vision transformer framework fusing mammography and ultrasonography for breast cancer diagnosis in low-resource clinical settings with restricted imaging modalities. Recognized for novel cross-modal feature fusion approach and clinical applicability. Paper under review at MIWAI 2026.

Best Poster Award — DSN AI+ Bootcamp 2025
05 /Technical Skills

Stack

Tools I reach for when building production ML systems and research pipelines.

Languages
Python C++ SQL
ML Frameworks
PyTorch TensorFlow Scikit-learn Keras OpenCV HF Transformers HF Diffusers Pandas NumPy
ML Domains
Computer Vision NLP LLM Fine-tuning RAG Multimodal ML Generative Models Memetic Algorithms Recommender Systems
MLOps & Infrastructure
Docker FastAPI Celery Redis Langchain CI/CD Git HF Spaces
Monitoring & Observability
LangSmith Prometheus Structured Logging Model Drift Detection Grafana
Cloud Platforms
AWS SageMaker AWS EC2 / S3 GCP Azure
Data & Storage
PostgreSQL Pandas PyArrow Parquet Filecoin

Proficiency by domain

06 /Community

Conferences & Community

Active contributor to the African AI ecosystem through research, mentorship, and community building.

AUG 2025
Deep Learning Indaba
Kigali, Rwanda
Participant & Travel Organizing Committee Member. Coordinated travel logistics enabling community members across Africa to attend.
JUL 2024
African Computer Vision Summer School
Nairobi, Kenya
Participant in intensive program covering computer vision research with focus on African applications and datasets.
SEP 2023
Deep Learning Indaba
Accra, Ghana
Participant at one of Africa's premier ML conferences, connecting researchers and practitioners continent-wide.
2025
DSN AI+ Bootcamp & Hackathon
Lagos, Nigeria
Presented MMIBC multimodal breast cancer diagnosis framework.
Best Poster Award
JUN 2023 – OCT 2025
Chapter Lead — Data Science Nigeria (DSN) FUNAAB
Federal University of Agriculture Abeokuta, Nigeria
Led a 100+ member AI community. Organized weekly technical workshops on ML, computer vision, and NLP, plus sessions on research methodology and career development. Led a crowdfunding campaign enabling multiple members to attend DLI 2023. Mentored junior members, several of whom advanced into leadership roles.
Let's Connect

Get In Touch

Open to full-time ML engineering roles, research collaborations, and speaking opportunities.

testimonyadekoya.02@gmail.com