Who I am

I’m Rotimi Akinyele. I run security and AI engineering at one of the world’s largest fintech trading platforms, where over $600 billion flows through our systems every month.

I started in offensive security. Pentesting, red teaming, exploit development. OSCP, OSCE, two-time Global Cyberlympics African Champion. I founded NaijaSecCon and built NaijaSecForce, a CTF team that’s won regionally and globally in exploitation, reverse engineering, and cryptography.

Before Deriv, I spent years in enterprise security leadership across the UAE, including building a security and business continuity function from scratch at a government authority. I’ve done consulting across government, fintech, telco, energy, and healthcare in the Middle East and Africa. 15+ years of this.

At Deriv, I lead a 130-person org spanning SOC, AppSec, Cloud Security, GRC, IAM, AI Engineering, and Anti-Fraud. But the part I’m most obsessed with right now is building AI agents that actually do security work. Not chatbots. Not demos. Production agents that hunt threats, run pentests, triage alerts, audit compliance, and catch fraud autonomously. I also lead AI engineering for finance and compliance, working with those teams on building agents that ease the work they do.

In my free time, I trade. Most of it goes to building algorithmic bots for trading and just R&D with AI and its intersection with security, including building multiple security tools and platforms that only live on my laptop :D

What you’ll get here

AI security from the inside. Vulnerability research from someone who’s still finding bugs. Trading bot experiments with real data. Things that work in production, not things that sound good in a pitch deck.

If you want the polished corporate version, check LinkedIn. This is where I say what I actually think.

Why subscribe?

Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and publication archives.