My Leap into Eaglelion

My time at YeneHealth came to an end a few weeks back, i needed a change in career. Working with the team for about two years was an incredibly rewarding experience. I learned so much, and it left a lasting impression on me of what a well managed and well maintained company looks like. But I felt the need to grow, to challenge myself for the year ahead.

That’s when Eaglelion appeared, at just the right time, thanks to a nudge from my friend Aman. Aman and I go way back to my time at Ahun, when he was just starting out as an intern. Today, he manages his own team — something I’m genuinely proud of. And I should say this clearly: my move to Eaglelion wasn’t some carefully planned career step. It was more an act of necessity; growth at YeneHealth had slowed, and I felt restless. Aman didn’t just suggest Eaglelion to me, he practically hauled me into it.

But the leap wasn’t glamorous. The office was in Sarbet, which, for those based in the city, might as well be another planet. I had doubts. Some of my colleagues traveled even farther without complaint. That contrast made me ask myself some hard questions about my own resilience.

Meanwhile, Eaglelion was scaling fast, hiring 50 to 60 people in a just that month. At first, I read this as ominous, rapid expansion usually foreshadows inevitable layoffs. I can’t say for certain that instinct was wrong (time will tell), but in the moment, it nearly pushed me to walk away.

Then things shifted. Eaglelion had good reason for expanding: it was securing contracts with major banks — Dashen Bank, the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, Bank of Abyssinia, and many more. For me, this was transformative.

I’d always wanted to make an impact in the banking sector, but it’s an infamously closed world for locals. Recently, however, the Ethiopian government has been opening that door wide, awarding large contracts to private industry. Suddenly, I found myself part of something much bigger: banking infrastructure. And here’s the thing, opportunities of this scale rarely arrive when you feel ready. They just arrive, and you either take the leap or let them pass.

There was no onboarding process to ease into things. The first week I spent observing and learning team dynamics. By the second week, I was assigned to the CBE Superapp and CBE Paperless team. They were building everything in Go, which suited me well.

I gravitated toward telemetry monitoring, partly because it was a requirement for CBE Security & Compliance, and also because it gave me a degree of independence. Within three weeks, I had a working prototype: advanced telemetry integrated into a Golang starter project. When I demonstrated it across teams, I was surprised by how quickly the idea caught on. It was no longer just about “logs and traces”, it was about shaping how reliability itself could be measured and understood at scale.

Still, it would be misleading to frame this story as purely technical progress. The real challenge was people. With so many new hires, dependencies multiplied quickly, and getting a full picture of the project meant constantly learning from others. My telemetry documentation, therefore, had to go beyond “how” into “why”, not just how to record data, but how to understand and work with it.

This is still early days. Most of my time right now is spent learning, asking questions, and mapping the terrain. But I plan to publish my experiences on the telemetry projects and share my worldview along the way. Consider this the prologue, more to come soon.