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For 91��Ƶ alum Onye Ohiaeri (MS in Computer Science ’21), building a career in technology was an unexpected path. Born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria, Onye came to the United States to attend UC Berkeley, earning his undergraduate degree in political economy in 2018. But after graduation, he realized he wanted to pivot toward a more technical career without having to start over from scratch.

That search led him to 91��Ƶ’s Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems. “I was looking for a program that took AI and machine learning seriously as a discipline, that was located somewhere I could build a real network alongside the degree, and that had professors who actually worked on the kinds of problems I wanted to solve,” Onye said. “91��Ƶ's Seidenberg School checked all three boxes. Being in New York meant I'd be surrounded by industry, and the curriculum focused on the technical areas I wanted to grow into. Looking back, choosing Seidenberg was one of the best decisions I’ve made—it gave me both the technical foundation and the location to launch the career I have now.”

The architecture decisions I make today all trace back to the foundation Professor Simo gave us.

A Foundation for Success

One Seidenberg course in particular would go on to shape much of Onye’s professional career: , taught by Professor Altion Simo.

“Professor Simo had a way of taking concepts that sounded abstract—parallelization, distributed coordination, scalability—and making them feel intuitive and practical,” Onye described. “He didn’t just teach the theory; he showed us how distributed systems actually get built at scale.”

The lessons from that class extended well beyond graduation. “I use what I learned in that class every single day,” he said. “The architecture decisions I make today all trace back to the foundation Professor Simo gave us.”

Like many students whose graduate studies overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic, Onye’s experience at 91��Ƶ looked different than he originally imagined. Traditional networking opportunities disappeared almost overnight, forcing him to find new ways to connect with the industry he hoped to enter. “What I learned from that experience ended up being one of the most valuable lessons of my entire education: when the obvious paths close, you have to build your own,” Onye said.

Since he couldn’t rely on career fairs or in-person recruiting events at the time, Onye began reaching out directly to engineers and technology leaders whose work he admired. He researched the projects they were building and sent thoughtful messages engaging with their work, sometimes sharing ideas and solutions he had learned at Seidenberg that related to those challenges. “That approach is how I landed my first internship at , and it’s ultimately how I got to Amazon,” he said.

Soon after Code and Theory, a Seidenberg professor connected him with an internship opportunity at , where he worked from 2020 through early 2021 while completing his degree. By the time he graduated, Onye had built both a professional network and a portfolio of technical experience through a combination of persistence, initiative, and support from the Seidenberg community.

Choosing Seidenberg was one of the best decisions I’ve made—it gave me both the technical foundation and the location to launch the career I have now.

From Student to Engineer at Amazon

After graduating in 2021, Onye joined as a software engineer, where he spent four years working on large-scale systems serving millions of users worldwide.

During his time there, he contributed to projects including Prime Video’s “Top 10 Movies” feature, improvements to the platform’s search infrastructure, and the integration of Thursday Night Football into the search experience.

He also became the lead engineer responsible for dynamically scaling traffic infrastructure during major live events. “Scaling distributed systems to handle real-world traffic patterns—especially unpredictable traffic from live sports—is one of the harder problems in distributed computing and being trusted as the scaling lead for a service of that magnitude was a defining experience,” Onye said.

The role drew directly from the distributed systems concepts he first explored at Seidenberg.

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Launching Something New

In January 2026, Onye’s position at Amazon was eliminated as part of a company-wide reduction in force—a reality that has impacted many engineers across today’s tech industry. But rather than viewing the moment as a setback, he used it as an opportunity to focus fully on a personal project he had already been building on the side: .

The idea for the app came from a familiar frustration during group dinners and trips with friends. “People would forget who owed whom, and figuring it out in the moment was painful,” Onye said. “Existing bill-splitting apps were clunky enough that nobody wanted to use them at the table.”

Convinced there had to be a better way to deal with these situations, Onye built one. Cheqmate streamlines the process by automatically surfacing venues and friend groups, allowing users to split bills quickly and discover places their friends already enjoy visiting. “The vision is that Cheqmate makes going out with your friends easier, more spontaneous, and more fun—from the moment you decide where to go all the way through splitting the check at the end,” Onye said.

Built using the same distributed systems principles Onye learned at Seidenberg and refined at Amazon, the app launched publicly on the Apple App Store in April 2026 and has continued to grow driven entirely by word-of-mouth adoption.

If your path looks messy or non-linear, that’s not a problem to solve. It’s often the source of your edge.

Turning Challenges into Opportunities

Onye has also stayed connected to 91��Ƶ since graduating. Most recently, he returned to 91��Ƶ to judge final project presentations for a Seidenberg computer science course, offering feedback to current students developing their own applications. “It was a full-circle moment,” he said.

His advice to students and recent graduates centers on initiative, persistence, and embracing unconventional paths. “Build something real before you graduate,” Onye said. “Classes give you the foundation, but the engineers who stand out are the ones who can point to something they built.”

He also encourages students not to underestimate the power of outreach and networking. “Cold outreach works better than you think,” he said. “Most students underestimate how willing people are to respond to a thoughtful, specific message from someone early in their career.”

Above all, Onye believes students shouldn’t feel pressured to follow a perfectly linear career path. “My path certainly didn’t look clean and linear from the outside. But every step taught me something, and the combination of all of it is what made me capable of doing what I do now,” he said. “If your path looks messy or non-linear, that’s not a problem to solve. It’s often the source of your edge.”