Assis Ngolo
Payments systems architect. Engineering leader. Builder.
Lisbon, Portugal. figassis@nellcorp.com.
Lisbon, Portugal. figassis@nellcorp.com.
summary
I have built financial systems for fifteen years. Three production ledgers, with a fourth bank-grade double-entry rebuild rolling out. An in-house payment facilitator on direct Chase rails, PCI DSS certified in 2022, with the sponsoring bank calling it one of the fastest payfac implementations they had seen. A card tokenization vault. A rules + ML fraud platform for the payfac. Cross-border crypto settlement before that. I still ship production code with my team. I do not pick between manager, product manager, and engineer; I am all three at once.
experience
Squire / Senior Engineering Manager, Payments
2021 to present
payments platform
- Leading the rebuild of the payments backbone: a 7-module system around a bank-grade double-entry ledger, multi-currency, multi-asset, use-case agnostic. Live in production processing real transactions, with reconciliation and drift detection as first-class subsystems.
- Built an in-house payment facilitator on direct Chase rails in under twelve months. Card issuance, ACH, refunds, chargebacks, dispute management. JPMC called it one of the fastest payfac implementations they had seen.
- Designed and shipped the card tokenization vault behind a strict API surface. Foundation for the platform's PCI DSS certification in 2022.
- Built Squire Guard, the rules + ML fraud platform for the payfac. Stripe Radar alternative with a DSL that lets risk operators ship rules without a deploy.
- Built Watchdog, the stability and incident-detection platform. Catches misbehaving systems before customers see them. Saved revenue and CS cost during incidents.
- 90 to 100% sprint completion across the payments org through estimation, scoping, QA coordination, and planning discipline. I lead, I PM, I write code.
BVNK / Head of Engineering (employee #3, de facto CTO)
2017 to 2021
crypto x fiat infra
- Architected and built the distributed core banking platform: multi-currency, crypto-native ledger, multi-tenant double-entry accounting, AWS-IAM-style access control, generation of routable account numbers and IBANs.
- Implemented ISO 20022, ISO 8583, and Open Banking support, in 2017-2020, before Open Banking was something every fintech blog wrote about.
- Built one of the first production blockchain-enabled cross-border rails (Fiat to Crypto, mPesa to MTN Ghana) at a time when tangential crypto exposure would close a Stripe or PayPal account.
- Grew engineering 0 to 10. Established culture, CI/CD, reliability practices from scratch. Left in 2021.
- BVNK was acquired by Mastercard in March 2026 to connect on-chain payments and fiat rails.
Nellcorp / Founder & CEO
2010 to present
Delaware + Luanda
Delaware + Luanda
international payments + systems firm
- International payments and systems firm. Two entities: Nellcorp Inc. (Delaware, USA) for global product and client work, Nellcorp Lda. (Luanda, Angola) for Lusophone Africa.
- Delivered integrations on Angola's payment rails: Multicaixa, Multicaixa Express, Kwik.
- Shipped Crew (AI agent orchestration), humanidentity.io (decentralized identity), Bantumail (secure email), Brands (social media management). Currently building Nellcorp Pay.
- Designed the Human Identity Protocol (HIP): prove a person is human without handing personal data to platforms. Ed25519 certificates, HMAC-derived per-platform subject IDs, JWS attestations, append-only provider registry, three key-storage tiers. protocol.humanidentity.io · draft spec (Apache 2.0).
- Designed a stateless JWT revocation scheme: signed
sjticlaim per token, validated against a per-user server-side secret. Rotating the secret revokes every token instantly. No blacklist, no token store. Write-up. - Built a decentralized election fraud monitoring system for the 2022 Angolan election. Counted votes across all 18 provinces using low-tech photos of polling-station tally sheets. Real-time, distributed, paper-trail-backed.
Earlier / Engineer, lead, then head of teams across critical industries
2010 to 2017
multiple roles
- Transportation: emergency control system for the City of Porto's train network. Energy: protection, control, and SCADA systems for Angola's national utilities. Education: school ERP on Fedena / BigBlueButton / Canvas, kept many Angolan schools running through the pandemic. Business: ERP rollouts on Odoo and ERPNext.
achievements
- /01 $1B+/yr platform I lead at Squire
- /02 Payfac on Chase rails, PCI DSS 2022
- /03 3 production ledgers shipped, a 4th rolling out
- /04 BVNK to Mastercard, March 2026
- /05 90-100% sprint completion at Squire
- /06 Election monitoring, 18 provinces, 2022
technical
languages
Go, Node.js, TypeScript, SQL
data
PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka
infra
AWS (EKS/ECS, SQS/SNS, Lambda, RDS), Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD, observability
payments
PCI DSS, tokenization, ISO 20022, ISO 8583, ACH, payfac, ledgers, KYC, AML, fraud prevention
crypto
BIP44 wallets, multisig custody, stablecoin settlement, on-chain cross-border, crypto exchange
ai
AI-assisted development, agent orchestration (Crew), anomaly detection
leadership / ten lessons
Earn credibility before you spend it.
Title-based authority is a loan. Track-record authority is owned. I default to writing code, shipping fixes, and being in the failure with the team. Once that exists, you can lead almost anyone.
Translate. Constantly.
The same decision sounds different to an engineer, a PM, a CFO, and a regulator. For an exec, the lens is almost always: does this make us more money, does it cost us less, or does it reduce a risk that could destroy us? Anything outside that frame is noise.
Default to writing.
Decisions on paper become reviewable, comparable, and ownable. Conversations evaporate. I write a design doc before I write code on anything non-trivial, and I expect the same from senior engineers.
Cultivate the dissenter.
Most of the worst decisions I have watched get made were the ones where no one was paid to disagree. Find the engineer with the contrary view, listen, then do not punish them for being right.
Done means done and observable.
Reliability is a feature, not a clean-up project. I do not ship a critical path I cannot see when it breaks. Watchdog exists for a reason.
Repeat yourself until people listen.
Most leadership is restating the same priority in a slightly different way for the eighth time. That is not failure; that is the job.
Pick your battles. Then fight them all the way.
I let small disagreements slide. The ones I do not let slide, I take to the wall. People learn fast which is which.
Make others bigger.
Give the project away once you have built it. Help the engineer below you get promoted. Coach the manager who is struggling. Your impact scales when you stop being the bottleneck.
Feedback is observations, not evaluations.
Notice. State the consequence. Suggest a fix, framed as a suggestion. "This code is bad" is useless; "this function rolls its own hashing instead of using the standard library" is feedback. Same applies upward.
Go find the work.
Every senior engineer and leader I respect goes looking for the next big problem before it is assigned. The ones who wait stay senior forever.
education
Rochester Institute of Technology / MSc. Computer Systems Networking & Telecommunications
2014
Rochester Institute of Technology / BSc. Computer & Software Engineering
2011
contact
email figassis@nellcorp.com
us +1 585 205 8286
angola +244 939 554 383
location Lisbon, Portugal
company nellcorp.com