Founding CTO (Web2)

Location: US

Department: Executive Office

We are supporting a venture-backed, early-stage technology company building a white-label consumer engagement and rewards platform for global brands. The platform enables large-scale fan and customer experiences (e.g. predictions, quests, digital rewards, ticketing and commerce) while incorporating tokenised settlement and rewards infrastructure.

This role represents a true greenfield build. The Founding CTO will define the overall system architecture, technical standards, and engineering culture from day one, while delivering a production-grade platform designed to scale to millions of users.

As Founding CTO, you will take end-to-end ownership of the technology organisation, from initial architecture and hands-on development through to team build-out and long-term technical strategy.

You will work closely with founders and commercial stakeholders, translating product vision into scalable systems and ensuring the platform can support multiple partners, brands, and regions.

Responsibilities

• Platform & architecture
• Define and build the core platform architecture supporting engagement mechanics, rewards, commerce, and analytics
• Establish system design principles covering scalability, security, and performance
• Make key build-vs-buy decisions and select vendors, tooling, and infrastructure partners
• Backend & infrastructure
• Architect and implement backend services supporting real-time event ingestion, points/wallet systems, identity, and compliance controls
• Design robust data pipelines, storage, and API layers
• Own production readiness, including monitoring, alerting, SLOs, and incident response processes
• Consumer products
• Oversee development of mobile (iOS/Android) and web applications delivered under partner branding
• Ensure high-quality user experience across consumer touchpoints
• Token & rewards infrastructure
• Lead design and integration of tokenised reward systems, including smart contracts and distribution logic
• Manage wallet integrations and fiat on/off-ramps in collaboration with external providers
• Integrations
• Build and maintain APIs connecting to external data feeds, ticketing systems, commerce platforms, and sponsor tools
• Leadership & team
• Hire, mentor, and scale a high-performing engineering team
• Establish engineering standards, documentation practices, and development workflows
• Act as a hands-on technical leader while progressively transitioning to strategic oversight

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience building consumer-facing technology products
• Proven experience delivering at least one 0-to-1 platform
• Track record of shipping and operating products at scale (100K+ users)
• Strong backend engineering background (distributed systems, real-time data, API design)
• Experience designing production-grade systems with high reliability requirements
• Comfortable working across frontend, backend, and infrastructure layers
• Strong written and verbal communication skills (architecture docs, technical strategy, roadmap planning)

Strongly preferred

• Experience with loyalty, gaming, or marketplace-style mechanics (e.g. rewards, auctions, prediction-style systems)
• Familiarity with blockchain or tokenised systems (smart contracts, wallets, settlement flows)
• Background in security-sensitive or compliance-aware systems
• Experience building white-label or multi-tenant platforms

Technical environment (current / planned)

• Languages: TypeScript/JavaScript, Node.js, Python; Go or Rust exposure is a plus
• Mobile: React Native or Flutter; native iOS (Swift) / Android (Kotlin) experience advantageous
• Infrastructure: Cloud-native (GCP), Docker/Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines
• Data: PostgreSQL, Redis, event streaming (Kafka or equivalent)
• Web3 exposure: Solidity fundamentals, wallet integrations, token mechanics