Senior product engineer · Applied AI
I turn uncertain ideas into useful software.
I design, build, and operate production AI products—from the first interface and data model to evals, infrastructure, and the work that keeps them reliable.
Selected work
Products in the world.
AI search product
WhatIsThatMovie
Find a film from a half-remembered scene, character, or feeling.
~133K visitors in a recent 30-day period
Natural language to data
WhatMedicaidPays
Ask plain-English questions over Medicaid reimbursement data for all 50 states.
Safe NL→SQL with charts, tables, and maps
Developer tool
ThreadCast
Turn local AI coding sessions into clean, shareable web pages.
CLI, MCP server, and plugins
A little context
Builder, operator, open-source contributor.
I'm Justin Ahinon. I'm a senior product engineer who builds and operates AI products end to end. I'm based between Cotonou, Nairobi, and Cape Town, and run Okupter, a one-person product studio.
Before Svelte, I spent four years on WordPress Core (sponsored by Yoast), led its Performance team, and ran the migration of its end-to-end tests to Playwright. I co-founded AfricArXiv, the first open preprint repository for African scholarship, and I'm still its technical advisor.
I was the main engineer on Updraft, Cyfrin's Web3 education platform (~100K monthly users), then a senior engineer at Fabric Blockchain Labs building real-time DeFi trading and LLM-powered customer support. Svelte and SvelteKit are still my deepest frontend tools, but most of my recent work sits at the intersection of product engineering and applied AI.
Now I split my time between client work and products I build and operate: AI search, natural-language data tools, research agents, developer tooling, and a handful of smaller experiments. If that sounds useful to your team, here's what I can bring.
Recent writing