Ozowara Bags Award For Software Development Excellence
The Four-YThere is a particular kind of recognition that carries its full weight only when you understand what preceded it. When David Excel Ozowara, a Software Engineering Analyst at Goldman Sachs in Dallas, Texas, was named Most Promising Software Development Professional of the Year at the 11th edition of the Nigeria Technology Awards on December […]
The Four-YThere is a particular kind of recognition that carries its full weight only when you understand what preceded it. When David Excel Ozowara, a Software Engineering Analyst at Goldman Sachs in Dallas, Texas, was named Most Promising Software Development Professional of the Year at the 11th edition of the Nigeria Technology Awards on December 6, 2025, the announcement landed as the most visible point on a trajectory that had been building for four years. The NiTA award, earned through a rigorous multi-stage evaluation process that drew nominations across 27 categories, is the formal marker of a career that began taking its shape in the research literature in 2021 and has since moved through peer review panels, international editorial boards, software engineering internships, and the demanding infrastructure environment of one of the world’s leading investment banks.
Ozowara, reflecting on the relationship between his research and editorial work and his engineering career, described the two tracks as mutually reinforcing rather than separate. “The research and the peer review were never separate from the engineering for me,” he said. “They were part of the same formation. When you spend time evaluating other people’s frameworks, you become more rigorous about your own. You start to ask harder questions about whether what you are building is actually solving a genuine problem or just producing output.” That rigour, applied to the technical work he performs at Goldman Sachs, is the product of years of disciplined engagement with the scholarly literature on software architecture, governance, and enterprise systems.
Dr. Felix C. Nnuji, Event Director and Advisory Board Member of the Nigeria Technology Awards, has spent more than a decade building the evaluation infrastructure that gives NiTA’s recognition its weight. He described the profile that the NiTA process is designed to identify and what it found in Ozowara. “We built NiTA to be the kind of award that means something when you put it on a professional record,” Dr. Nnuji said. “That means the process has to be harder than it looks. It means that when someone wins, the people who know the industry understand what that represents.” The prohibition on self-nomination means Ozowara’s path to recognition required an independent third party to identify his work as award-worthy and commit to the formal process on his behalf. The subsequent three-tier review, conducted by a 12-member Advisory Board against a five-point rubric, produced a winner whose credentials withstand independent scrutiny.
Ozowara’s Section Editor appointments across three international journals and two publishing groups since 2021 are a dimension of his profile that speaks to a form of recognised expertise distinct from, but connected to, his engineering work. Being appointed to evaluate submitted manuscripts in cloud computing, data analytics, artificial intelligence, software engineering, and financial technology systems means having been judged by journal editorial boards as possessing the technical standing to assess other researchers’ contributions in those domains. Ozowara described what that responsibility required of him. “Being a Section Editor meant sitting with someone else’s research and asking whether it was actually contributing something new to the field,” he said. “That kind of discipline changes how you approach your own work. It raises the bar you hold yourself to.” The Editor of the Year recognition he received from the Computer Science and IT Research Journal for his 2023 contributions is the formal acknowledgement of how that discipline has been assessed by the journals he serves.
Dr. Nnuji, speaking about what the NiTA recognition means in the context of the full trajectory it marks, drew the arc explicitly. “David Ozowara did not arrive at Goldman Sachs and then win NiTA,” Dr. Nnuji said. “He arrived at NiTA through years of demonstrated contribution to the Nigerian technology community and to the global research and engineering landscape. The award is recognising a body of work, not a single achievement.” That characterisation is consistent with how Ozowara himself describes the significance of the recognition. “The award is the most visible thing,” he said, “but the years that led to it are the part that actually matters to me. The research, the peer review, the engineering, each of those built something in me that the award is now recognising. They are not background to the award. They are the award.”
The question of what a recognition like NiTA means for the larger Nigerian technology community is one that Dr. Nnuji has addressed across multiple editions. His answer has not changed substantially over eleven years. “Nigeria’s technology story is not limited to what happens inside the country,” Dr. Nnuji said. “It includes every Nigerian who is building something significant, wherever they are. NiTA exists to tell that story, and to tell it with documentation that holds up to scrutiny.” Ozowara, for his part, said he hopes the visibility of his recognition communicates something specific to the engineers who will follow him. “I want this to mean something for the people coming after me,” he said. “The path from student to researcher to peer reviewer to Goldman Sachs is a path that is open. It requires commitment and it requires years, but it is open. That is what I want this award to say.” The evidence supporting that statement, accumulated across four years of research, peer review, editorial service, and engineering practice, is not difficult to find.