Kamal Salisu

Software engineer moving into product management.

Open to product management roles · Remote or relocation

I'm a software engineer who likes owning things end to end — taking a problem from rough idea to something people rely on every day. For the past six years I've been at Makrwatch, a YC-backed startup connecting brands with creators, where I was the sole dedicated engineer on a new business line that grew into the company's largest.

My best work has come from sitting with the people who use what I build — creators, talent managers, operations, and payments teams — and turning their manual work into products. Much of that has been AI: systems that detect sponsored content as it goes live and screen hundreds of thousands of creators a month.

I'm now moving into product management, and deepening my AI background with a master's in Artificial Intelligence at UT Austin (expected December 2027).

Selected work

$3M+ billings in ~3 years

Talent Agency

Makrwatch launched a new business line representing creators — screening their inbound sponsorship offers, pitching them to brands, and collecting payments. I was its sole dedicated engineer from launch, partnering with one PM and one talent manager. We ran it on Asana, Zapier, Slack, and Front first, then I led the migration onto the company's core platform as it grew. Along the way I gathered feedback from creators, talent managers, operations, admin, and payments teams and turned it into requirements — including an invoicing pipeline that bills brands automatically and saves about 30 minutes of manual work per invoice. The business passed $3M in billings within about three years and is now the company's largest business line.

4 days same day

Same-day creator billing

Manually recorded sponsorships took a median of four days to bill. I built an AI system that detects sponsored content in YouTube videos as it goes live, so creators can be billed the same day.

350K creators / month

AI creator screening

To fill brand campaign budgets, we source creators who fit each campaign. That screening used to be outsourced to human reviewers on Mechanical Turk. I replaced it with an AI-powered funnel with configurable screening criteria — eliminating the Mechanical Turk spend and scaling screening to around 350,000 creators a month.

Earlier work

Before Makrwatch, I owned the backend of ComX at AFEX — a digital commodities trading platform regulated by Nigeria's SEC — through its launch. It went on to serve 80,000+ investors.