Ifetayo Agboola didn’t follow a corporate playbook. From sneaking out at age six to turn on his mother’s computer in Ilorin, Kwara State, North-central Nigeria, to installing campus Wi-Fi during NYSC at Unilorin, his trajectory was built on curiosity, field execution, and unprompted referrals. When an AWS recruiter reached out on LinkedIn about a role expanding hyperscale data centres in Frankfurt, Agboola almost ignored it—thinking the message was a hoax. Today, he works in Finland, engineering liquid-cooled High-Performance Computing (HPC) clusters for AI and global finance. In this edition of My Life in Tech, JOHN ADOYI traces Ifetayo Agboola’s journey from Kwara State network operations to the frontlines of European AI infrastructure.
Ifetayo Agboola, a data-centre operations professional, did not realise he had built his entire career without ever successfully applying for a job through a standard job portal until a colleague pointed it out.
“Every major role I’ve held came through referrals,” he says. “If I had relied solely on formal applications, I might never have been picked.”
Yet while referrals opened doors, it was Agboola’s willingness to step into unfamiliar technical territory and figure things out that kept him moving through them. “I’ve always been curious,” he explains. “I constantly want to understand how systems function and how to make them better.”
Originally published by TechCabal.