Senior Engineer & Team Lead · Vancouver, BC
I build software for a living, and I care about getting the details right.
My resume can tell you where I've worked. This page is for the things it can't hold: how I got here, what I make when nobody is asking, and the people I've taught along the way. If you're deciding whether to email me, start here.
The short version
I'm a self-taught engineer from Lagos, living in Vancouver these days. My day job is the plumbing behind payments and a few AI features, the kind of work that's only visible when it breaks. But the habit underneath is older than any job: I like taking things apart to see how they work, then putting them back together a little better. That's why I mentor, why I write, and why my weekends keep turning into side projects. Also, I support Chelsea. Nobody's perfect.
yes, the same johnkingzy you found on GitHub
Work
The day jobs, briefly.
The full story lives in my resume, with the dates and numbers where they belong. Here's the shape of it.
Opiniion
CurrentJul 2025 – Present
Senior Software Engineer & Team Lead
I work across the payments, rewards, and AI product areas. Some weeks that means system design, other weeks it means being one of the people who answer when production breaks. The resident-outreach system I designed and launched now runs across 3,000+ properties. I also took our AI visibility product from a shaky beta to a real launch, now serving 100+ customer locations.
Rentgrata
Feb 2023 – Jul 2025
Senior Software Engineer
Part of the teams behind the payment infrastructure and an LLM-powered insights engine; in one five-month stretch we watched claimed rewards double, from $100K to over $200K. The piece that was mine alone: an ETL pipeline I designed and built to pull insights out of years of resident and prospect conversations about properties.
Andela
Mar 2017 – Dec 2022
Software Engineer
Six years of client work, mostly with The Zebra in Austin and LawTrades in New York, with a stint leading a team of six on an internal product.
Things a resume can't hold.
Building
Side projects used to mean weekend repos. Lately they mean shipping. I built and launched Chatterfly Social Skills, a mobile app that teaches conversation skills through role-play and feedback, designed with a behavior analyst and now available in 177 countries. Then came Northword, which helps people prepare for the CELPIP exam on their way to permanent residency or citizenship in Canada. The older experiments still live on my GitHub, collecting stars very slowly.
Everything else
Away from the keyboard I read a lot, play adventure games, and wait patiently for Chelsea to be good again. I also finished a computer science degree part-time while working full-time, which taught me more about pacing than any productivity book. I'm the kind of person who optimizes things that didn't ask to be optimized.
Teaching · Codementor, 2018 – 2022
300+ developers mentoredFor a few years I spent my evenings on Codementor, pairing with people who were learning JavaScript, React, PHP, and Node.js. Somewhere past the three hundredth session I realized I was learning as much about explaining things as they were about code. A few of them said kind words:
“Best of the best - Kingsley is super friendly & quickly helped me address my issue. He also explained everything concisely ! Definitely looking forward to pair programming again! :)”
“He made me think about the problem which enabled me to solve the problem myself. This is the best type of teaching.”
“Kingsley is a pleasure to work with. He's an excellent teacher and I highly recommend him.”
Say hello.
Email works best. Tell me what you're building or what you're stuck on, and you'll get a reply from a person, not a template.
hi@kingsleysolomon.coVancouver, BC