Some careers are built loudly, in product launches and public wins. Others are built in the quiet architecture behind the scenes, in the pipelines, permission sets and deployment schedules that keep an organization’s software running without anyone outside the IT department noticing.

20 years into the second kind of career, Olaniyi Badmus has had his name pulled into the open, named Most Exceptional Salesforce DevOps and Systems Analytics Professional of the Year 2023 by the Nigeria Technology Awards.

Badmus, having built that career across five countries: the United Kingdom, Nigeria, New Zealand, Australia and Canada learned of the honor while at his current post in Toronto, where he works as Senior Salesforce Consultant and DevOps Specialist at Telus.

Reached for comment, he did not hide how much it landed. “Honestly, I had to sit down when I read the email,” Mr Badmus said. “20-years of unglamorous, invisible work, and for one moment somebody actually saw it. I will not pretend that did not hit me hard.”

The path to that reaction started with a Diploma in Business Administration and Management from the Federal Polytechnic in Ede, Osun State, earned in 2004, the same year Badmus took his first CRM support role at Telefonica O2 in Rotherham, England. He went on to complete a Higher National Certificate, a bachelor’s degree in Banking, Insurance and Risk Management, and an MBA in Information Systems, all at Sheffield Hallam University, while building a career in CRM support and administration.

From Rotherham, his record traces stops at Hadmor Nigeria in Ibadan, Fujitsu New Zealand, Health New Zealand and New Zealand Post Group in Auckland, followed by a run of consulting contracts in Melbourne, including engagements connected to Pepperstone Group, Accenture, Sigma Healthcare and, through DeftCRM, Salesforce projects for the University of Melbourne and Monash University.

Since January 2022, Badmus has held his current post at Telus in Toronto, where his responsibilities include designing and managing Salesforce CI/CD pipelines with Copado and GitHub, work built around reducing deployment time and improving rollback reliability.

He also helps development teams adopt Git branching strategies, peer code review and static code analysis, the kind of governance work that sits at the center of what the Nigeria Technology Awards recognized this year.

“If you had told the 24-year-old version of me, sitting at a support desk in Rotherham with no idea what came next, that this is where it would lead, I would have laughed at you,” Badmus said. “I did not have a plan back then. I had bills, a diploma, and a stubborn refusal to give up on myself.”

Away from client work, Badmus has built research and reviewing record to match. His record lists eight papers on Salesforce DevOps, integration and CRM governance published between 2018 and 2023, along with editorial or peer review positions at three journals.

He has also been elected to three professional fellowships, including the Institute of Management Consultants Nigeria and the Chartered Institute of Information and Strategy Management, the latter awarded in June 2022, and holds more than thirty professional certifications, the most recent being Professional Scrum Master I, completed in March 2022.

That growing research record had already drawn coverage in Nigerian media; ThisDay profiled his work on nonprofit CRM transformation in December 2023.

Asked whether the award changes anything, Badmus turned the question back toward the people he says he is really speaking to. “There are young Nigerians right now who have been told this kind of career belongs to people with connections or money behind them, and I need them to hear me say that is a lie,” he said.

“I left Nigeria with neither. What carried me was a diploma, a support desk job, and pure stubbornness. If I can do this, so can you, and I mean that with everything in me.”

The Nigeria Technology Awards has honored technology professionals and organizations in Nigeria since 2015. This year’s recognition ties Badmus’s name to a discipline he has practiced since 2004: keeping enterprise CRM systems stable, current, and, when it works well, invisible.

For his part, Badmus says the award has not changed his calendar. He is still reviewing pull requests, refreshing sandboxes, and training staff on deployment governance, the same routine that built the record now being recognised.