Aurel Atioukpe
Available for work

Software engineer · Cotonou, Benin · UTC+1

I build digital products that are useful, thoughtful, and technically deep.

Backends, AI systems, and the data underneath them. When I want to understand how something works, I write it from scratch: a database, a ray tracer, a neural network. Then I ship the product that sits on top.

See the work Download CV
Where my work sits

  1. Surface

    Pixels, game feel, interfaces

  2. Product

    Screens and flows people hold

  3. Logic

    APIs, auth, model orchestration

  4. Data

    Storage, durability, retrieval

  5. Maths

    The arithmetic under everything

Featured case study · 2025/26

An AI tutor for francophone West Africa

Lead engineer, from the product redesign in Figma to production. Students ask questions, photograph their homework and revise with generated quizzes. Every answer is checked against the official school curriculum, so the tutor knows when a question is off the syllabus.

serverless functions
46
mobile screens
40+
grounding threshold, measured
0.66

Product and client kept anonymous.

How a question gets answered
  1. 01

    Student asks

    « C’est quoi le travail d’une force ? »

  2. 02

    Embed

    Gemini embedding, truncated to 768 dimensions and renormalised

  3. 03

    Search

    pgvector over curriculum nodes, filtered by country, grade and track

  4. 04

    Gate

    Similarity ≥ 0.66, calibrated on real student questions

On the syllabus

Answers from the matching lesson

Off the syllabus

Says so, instead of pretending

Engineering

Written from scratch, to understand it.

A database, an auth library, a ray tracer and a neural network. Each one exists because I wanted to know how the real thing works.

SlimDB

77 tests

A crash-safe embedded database in Rust. No server, no configuration, no SQL.

Under the hood

Write-ahead log with fsync per write. Torn writes are detected and truncated on recovery. Checksummed, versioned format.

revocable-jwt

0 dependencies

Stateless JWT auth you can actually revoke, plus the OTP and rate limiting a phone-first login needs.

Under the hood

A version claim checked on every request. One UPDATE invalidates every token, on every device.

Spheres, a cone and a capped cylinder on a reflective floor, rendered by Retsu

Retsu

4.4× on 4 cores

A ray tracer from scratch in C++17, with a scene format and a parser of its own.

Under the hood

Recursive reflection, analytic intersections for four primitives, OpenMP rows scheduled dynamically.

NCWCBMWMB
N30148731510
CW611210410
CB450145032
MW51701990
MB30210213

Zero white and black mix-ups in 903 positions.

Rows: expected
Columns: predicted

chess-nn

72.5% held-out

A neural network with no ML library, reading chess positions from FEN notation.

Under the hood

It never confuses white with black. Every error is about severity: it learned the geometry, not the rules.

Games

After hours, I make games.

Made in Godot 4. Two demos, a prototype and a game jam entry, each one built to feel good in the hands.

Demo videos for every game · The jam entry is on itch.io

About

Hi, I'm Aurel.

I'm a software engineer from Cotonou, Benin, with a Bachelor in Computer Science from Epitech. I came to code through design: before I wrote software, I designed interfaces for a living, and I still redesign before I build.

Beyond code

  • Teaching

    Teaching assistant at Epitech, following 100+ students through their projects.

  • Community

    President of Game Cloud, Epitech Benin's game development society. A digital literacy week in rural Benin.

  • Writing

    I write fiction when I'm not writing code.

  • French · native
  • English · professional

Experience

  1. 2025/26

    Lead developer & product designer

    AI tutoring product, EdTech startup

  2. 2025

    Teaching assistant

    Epitech Benin

  3. 2024

    React Native developer

    TePlay

  4. 2024

    UI/UX designer

    Cerberes Technologies

  5. 2023/26

    Bachelor in Computer Science

    Epitech Benin

Contact

Got something to build?

© 2026 Aurel Atioukpe

Built from scratch, like everything else.

Cotonou · UTC+1