The Folklore
Head of Engineering
The Folklore is the leading commerce company empowering African and diasporic brands. Techstars '21, raised $1.7M to launch The Folklore Connect — a B2B wholesale platform... more connecting luxury brands in emerging markets to bulk retailers in North America and Europe.
I joined as the first engineering hire and built the function from scratch:
• Hired and led a team of 6+ engineers, establishing engineering culture, code standards, agile cadence, on-call, and developer productivity practices from zero
• Architected and shipped The Folklore Connect on AWS Fargate with a Vercel front-end, replacing legacy infrastructure
• Acted as de facto product manager during the first year — direct customer interviews with retailers and brands, JTBD analysis, roadmap prioritization, and executive partnership with the CEO
• Prototyped and demoed an AI-powered conversational recommendation system for retailers — early production GenAI work, ahead of the broader market shift to LLM-native commerce
• Transitioned to advisor in April 2025 to focus on Sunu
I joined as the first engineering hire and built the function from scratch:
• Hired and led a team of 6+ engineers, establishing engineering culture, code standards, agile cadence, on-call, and developer productivity practices from zero
• Architected and shipped The Folklore Connect on AWS Fargate with a Vercel front-end, replacing legacy infrastructure
• Acted as de facto product manager during the first year — direct customer interviews with retailers and brands, JTBD analysis, roadmap prioritization, and executive partnership with the CEO
• Prototyped and demoed an AI-powered conversational recommendation system for retailers — early production GenAI work, ahead of the broader market shift to LLM-native commerce
• Transitioned to advisor in April 2025 to focus on Sunu
