Startup CTO possible co-founder role, hands on Rust, startup experience a must have

Travoom•Austin, TX

4h•Remote

About The Position

This is a founding technical leadership role for OleOle, a football-focused social network and super app. The company is building a platform that combines real-time social feeds, messaging, short-form video, live scores, AI-powered features, and rewards/payments. This role is hands-on, requiring the individual to build, ship, review architecture, and understand modern product engineering at scale. It is suitable for someone with strong engineering judgment and startup execution ability, comfortable across backend architecture, real-time systems, infrastructure, product strategy, and technical leadership. The role may evolve into a co-founder-level position. The CTO will define the long-term technical architecture and help build and ship the platform alongside the engineering team. The ideal candidate is a product-first, systems-oriented technical leader with experience in areas such as real-time social feeds, messaging, high-performance backend architecture, AI infrastructure, and scalability. While expertise in every area is not required, strong experience across multiple domains and the ability to make pragmatic technical decisions are essential.

Requirements

7–15+ years of software engineering and technical leadership experience, ideally within startups or high-growth consumer technology platforms
Strong hands-on engineering background with active involvement in architecture, systems design, and production codebases
Significant experience building and scaling modern consumer platforms involving real-time systems, high concurrency, and large-scale user engagement
Strong production Rust experience building asynchronous backend systems and distributed infrastructure
Deep understanding of backend architecture, APIs, event-driven systems, databases, caching, and scalable infrastructure design
Ability to make pragmatic technical tradeoffs balancing scalability, performance, speed, maintainability, and operational simplicity
Experience leading and mentoring engineering teams while remaining deeply technical and hands-on
Comfortable operating in fast-moving startup environments with ambiguity, evolving priorities, and limited process
Strong communication skills with the ability to explain architectural decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
Strong entrepreneurial judgment, ownership mentality, and execution focus
Personally designed and operated production systems at scale
Still enjoy building and solving technical problems directly
Focus on execution, shipping, and long-term maintainability
Value simplicity and practical engineering over unnecessary complexity
Comfortable taking ownership without requiring constant direction
Understand how modern consumer products scale technically and operationally
Can lead engineers without becoming disconnected from the technology

Nice To Haves

Experience building or operating social feeds and microblogging systems
Experience building or operating messaging or real-time communication platforms
Experience building or operating TikTok-style video or media infrastructure
Experience building or operating financial, wallet, fintech, or gambling infrastructure
Experience building or operating AI-powered consumer products
Experience building or operating large-scale SEO or content infrastructure
Experience with Rust-based consumer platforms
Experience with distributed systems and event-driven architectures
Experience with feeds, messaging, streaming, or recommendation systems
Experience with payments, crypto, wallet infrastructure, or gambling systems
Experience with AI infrastructure, search, recommendation, or translation systems
Startup leadership experience building products from zero to one
Existing network within startup, venture capital, or fundraising ecosystems
Passion for football, sports media, or global fan communities

Responsibilities

Define and lead the long-term technical architecture of the platform
Lead backend architecture and infrastructure strategy using Rust-based systems
Help build scalable systems supporting feeds, messaging, live updates, video, and data infrastructure
Oversee engineering direction across backend, frontend, infrastructure, and product systems
Partner closely with leadership on product and company strategy
Establish engineering culture, hiring standards, and technical execution processes
Work directly with engineers on architecture reviews, tradeoffs, and implementation decisions
Help design future financial infrastructure including rewards, wallets, payments, and crypto-related systems
Support AI-powered systems including translation, recommendation, search, and football history infrastructure
Ensure scalability, reliability, performance, and security across all systems