Gertrude
Abagale

Built a new workflow that allowed cards to be tokenized and saved to Paystack, enabling customers to use subscription-based card payments through Zoho. Completed end-to-end in staging environment.

After nearly 5 years of the Paystack Magento 2 plugin being unserviceable, rewrote outdated methods causing repeated failures, fixed a currency issue to ensure all Paystack-supported currencies were accessible, and upgraded checkout to the latest Paystack V2 — enabling customers to save card details to the Paystack vault.

Built a new feature for the Paystack WooCommerce plugin allowing merchants to configure custom discounts for customers based on card BIN. Also authored a detailed user guide so merchants could set up and manage discounts independently without needing team support.

The Paystack Events Calendar plugin had been crashing merchant WordPress sites for over 6 months — taking entire sites offline and requiring cPanel-level deletion to recover. Identified that Events Calendar's parent platform had silently changed how payment functions were called, updated the affected functions, and restored full plugin functionality.

Defined key metrics through cross-functional consultation and built Datadog dashboards to track spikes and dips in merchant infrastructure. Enabled early detection and resolution of merchant-specific downtime before it impacted their customers.

Built a no-code recurring billing tool for a bank using Google Sheets, enabling them to create and charge customers dynamic amounts without engineering involvement. Automated the verification and charging process using Paystack API endpoints — merchants enter customer details once at first charge, then only input the dynamic amount for each subsequent billing cycle.

Annually led a team to test and review all Paystack WordPress plugins for compatibility with the latest WordPress and PHP releases. Covered plugins including MemberPress, Payment Forms, and others — ensuring merchants experienced no disruption following platform updates.

Organised Paystack's first-ever developer roadshow in Ghana, travelling across the Northern, Ashanti, and Greater Accra regions. Engaged with over 2,000 developers, raised awareness of Paystack products, and provided hands-on support to resolve developer integration issues across the country.

Led end-to-end organisation of approximately 5 developer mixer events across Ghana, fostering direct engagement with the local tech ecosystem. These events helped Paystack better understand developer needs in Ghana and directly contributed to increased product adoption.

Designed and set up a new reporting workflow for the Solutions Engineering team to better track contributions to core Paystack business metrics and monitor the progress of special projects built for enterprise merchants.

Built a custom tax collection product for a government institution, enabling them to collect multiple categories of taxes without the overhead of building their own platform. The solution handled the full payment journey — collecting customer details, verifying them against the institution's API, and dynamically displaying the total tax owed from the API response. Supported partial payments where the API response included a partial payment parameter. Before proceeding to checkout, customers could see a real-time breakdown of payment fees calculated and displayed alongside their total, ensuring full transparency. Once payment was completed, an API call was made to the institution's notification endpoint, and the receipt returned in the response was automatically emailed to the customer.

Led real-time monitoring of cloud, endpoint, and network events across high-volume payment systems. Performed alert triage, deep log correlation, and indicator-of-compromise identification, followed by end-to-end containment, eradication, and remediation — reducing incident resolution time and strengthening the operational resilience of payment infrastructure.

Refined detection use cases and standardised incident response procedures to address gaps in investigation consistency and governance coverage. Improved alert quality, updated severity mapping and escalation pathways, and produced audit-ready documentation — directly strengthening the team's governance maturity and accountability posture.

Embedded security controls directly into the architecture of enterprise payment integrations from the outset — translating regulatory requirements into access control enforcement, encrypted communication, and audit trail design. Collaborated with compliance and security teams pre-go-live to validate controls, delivering a 30% improvement in operational efficiency with reduced post-launch risk exposure.

Groomed APIs and helped launch Ghana's first real-time bank transfer checkout option, embedding security and compliance controls throughout — from secure transaction handling and risk mitigation in live payment flows to full alignment with Bank of Ghana regulations. Coordinated cross-functionally with banking, compliance, and engineering stakeholders to ensure a governance-ready go-live.

Maintained continuous security oversight of AWS production environments — monitoring native security services, reviewing IAM practices, and ensuring centralized logging and audit trail visibility. Supported alignment of cloud infrastructure with compliance requirements under the shared responsibility model, improving cloud security posture and governance readiness across production systems.