About
I’m a software engineer based in Accra, Ghana, and a Lead Frontend Engineer at MTN Ghana. I lead the frontend development of the SSP platform and MTN Pay, and I’ve spent most of the last three years on the products customers use to manage their accounts and move money: Mobile Money, card checkout, airtime, SIM services, and the identity checks that sit around them.
I started in 2020 by building the website for Dkeys Music Institute. It was a small project, but it taught me how to work with people who don’t think in code, and how to ship something real for a real audience. After that came a short contract at Xcelsz fixing mobile layouts, component work on healthcare products at Jadaad Technologies, and a full rebuild of the Autosurveil GPS fleet tracking platform, where I owned both the Next.js frontend and the Node.js backend.
I joined the MTN Pulse team in July 2023 through Dexwin Tech. The app had grown quickly and it showed, so I spent a good part of my first year untangling it. I found more than 15 structural problems and led a migration that reduced technical debt by 40%. In March 2025 I was promoted to Lead Frontend Engineer, working on MTN Pay and the Self Service Portal.
More recently, an architecture review asked a simple question: why do customers need a different portal for every service? Account management, eCommerce, SIM swap and business services had each grown up as separate sites. I now lead the initiative that answers that question: a single platform made of independently deployed micro-frontends, with a shared design system underneath that I designed and introduced. Customers get one place for everything, and teams still ship on their own schedules.
Why I do this
Engineers, me included, can get carried away with tools and stacks. What actually excites me is the effect the work has on people’s lives.
I often picture a mother at home with a newborn. She can now swap her SIM without travelling to an MTN shop, or pay for a service through MTN Pay without stepping outside. She will probably never know my name, and she doesn’t need to. Knowing that something I built saved her a trip and gave her an easier day is the most fulfilling part of what I do.
That is also why I care so much about getting the details right. At this scale, a confusing screen or a failed payment isn’t an edge case. It’s someone’s afternoon.
How I work
Payments are unforgiving. A double tap can charge someone twice, and a success screen shown too early turns into a support ticket at best. So I try to understand a flow completely before I build it, including every way it can fail, and I treat security basics as requirements rather than extras: sanitised input, careful token handling, safe redirects, and no card data anywhere near the frontend.
I also write about this work. How Money Actually Moves walks through what happens between tapping Send and the money arriving, and PCI DSS for Frontend Engineers covers what card compliance means for the people building the checkout.
Outside work
I play keys and produce music, mostly in Ableton Live and MainStage. That’s also where my side projects come from. PulseMIDI is a macOS MIDI diagnostic and routing tool written in Rust with Tauri and React, and PulsePad is a pad controller for live performance. Both are still in development.
Education
I studied Computer Software Engineering at Ghana Communication Technology University. Before that I did General Science with Information Technology at Aggrey Memorial Senior High School in Cape Coast, where I served as Head Prefect for Academics.
Get in touch
I’m interested in teams building things that genuinely serve people, where technical rigour is valued. The best way to reach me is email at ernestniiyoyowah@gmail.com. I’m also on LinkedIn and GitHub.