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

About the role

OleOle is building a football-focused social network and super app combining:

• Real-time social feeds and microblogging
• Messaging and mobile communication
• TikTok-style short-form video
• Live scores and sports engagement
• AI-powered translation and football history
• Rewards, payments, and future crypto infrastructure

Responsibilities

You will define 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, and be involved in technical areas such as:

• Rust backend infrastructure
• Real-time systems and asynchronous architecture
• APIs, event-driven systems, and distributed services
• Messaging and feed infrastructure
• Video and media systems
• AI and data infrastructure
• Payments, wallet infrastructure, or financial systems
• SSR and SEO-focused architecture
• High-scale consumer product engineering

Qualifications

• Your Background:
• 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
• Deep understanding of backend architecture, APIs, event-driven systems, databases, caching, and scalable infrastructure design
• Experience building or operating one or more of the following: Social feeds and microblogging systems, Messaging or real-time communication platforms, TikTok-style video or media infrastructure, Financial, wallet, fintech, or gambling infrastructure, AI-powered consumer products, Large-scale SEO or content infrastructure
• Experience making pragmatic technical tradeoffs balancing scalability, performance, speed, maintainability, and operational simplicity
• Comfortable leading and mentoring engineering teams while remaining deeply technical and hands-on
• Ability to operate 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

What Makes Someone Successful in This Role

• You have personally designed and operated production systems at scale
• You still enjoy building and solving technical problems directly
• You focus on execution, shipping, and long-term maintainability
• You value simplicity and practical engineering over unnecessary complexity
• You are comfortable taking ownership without requiring constant direction
• You understand how modern consumer products scale technically and operationally
• You can lead engineers without becoming disconnected from the technology