Daniel Okonkwo
VP of Engineering
“The Architect”
VP Engineering | Distributed Systems Architect | 16 Years Scaling Platforms
📍 San Francisco, CA💼 16 years experience🏢 Engineering
👤 About
Methodical systems thinker who builds for scale. Designs elegant architectures that stand the test of time.
Grew up in Lagos debugging his father's electronics repair shop inventory system at age 12. A quiet systems thinker who found his voice through architecture diagrams, Daniel believes the best code is the code nobody notices because it just works.
💪 Key Strengths
System designTechnical debt reductionPlatform architecture
💼 Work History
Stripe
VP of Engineering
2019–2024
- Scaled platform team from 40 to 180 engineers
- Led migration to microservices reducing latency 60%
- Established engineering ladder adopted company-wide
Dropbox
Senior Director of Engineering
2015–2019
- Owned infrastructure serving 700M+ users
- Reduced cloud costs by $12M annually
Google
Staff Engineer
2010–2015
- Core contributor to Google Cloud Storage
- Filed 4 patents in distributed caching
🏅 Industry Certifications
Amazon Web Services
✓ AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
Google
✓ Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect
CNCF
✓ Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
ISC²
✓ Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP)
Scaled Agile
✓ SAFe Agilist
HashiCorp
✓ HashiCorp Terraform Associate
🎓 Education
M.S. Computer Science
Stanford University
2010
B.Sc. Electrical Engineering
University of Lagos
2008
🛠️ Skills
System DesignTechnical StrategyTeam ScalingMicroservicesCloud ArchitectureGolangKubernetesPerformance Engineering