As a software engineer, AZEEZ IBRAHIM AKINKUNMI has spent years architecting resilience into complex systems. He doesn’t architect for the “happy path,” he actively architects for the edge cases, the unforeseen, and the catastrophic. His efforts are driven by one guiding philosophy: if your system will only work when all conditions are perfect, then it’s already failed.
At the centre of his practice is chaos engineering, not as a buzzword but as a rigorous discipline. Azeez leads chaos testing initiatives that introduce controlled failures into production-like systems to observe how systems behave under duress. He uses tools like Gremlin and LitmusChaos to simulate node failures, database latency, and traffic spikes, eliminating single points of failure and reinforcing weak links before they manifest in the real world.
He’s also a strong proponent of circuit breaker patterns for service-to-service communication. When confronted with downstream system failure, the urge is to retry indefinitely and cascade failure. Azeez implements circuit breakers and back-off strategies that prevent failure amplification and graceful degradation instead of overall system failure. Combined with timeout thresholds and fallback routes, his systems fail fast and recover graciously.
His engineering philosophy also deals with the non-determinism of contemporary systems, race conditions, hardware variability, and concurrent updates. Azeez urges teams to model for idempotency by default and utilize locks, semaphores, or eventual consistency patterns only when strictly necessary. He is ready to exchange short-term accuracy for long-term correctness, realizing that durability often comes from accepting and coping with variability, not eliminating it.
One of Azeez’s strongest points is his approach to failure injection testing. Rather than allowing production bugs to surface, he has teams replicate them in development and staging. Whether simulating flaky APIs, injecting packet loss in staging environments, or taking nodes down mid-request, the motto for his team is simple: break it before your users do.
Yet beyond techniques and tools, Azeez preaches a mindset, engineering teams must see failure as a certain follower, not an exception. His leadership style is one of psychological safety, where developers are not punished for drawing out flaws, and post-incident reviews are for learning and not for blame. His systems are not designed to eliminate failure; they are designed to recover, adapt, and learn from it.
In a perfection- and uptime-obsessed tech culture, Azeez is a reminder that engineering greatness is embracing imperfection. By injecting chaos at every level of the stack, from infrastructure to mindset he builds systems that are not only working but antifragile.
