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 company while also helping build and ship the platform alongside the engineering team.

This role may evolve into a co-founder-level position for the right person.

• 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

Requirements

• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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

Qualifications

• Strong plus
• 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

Benefits

We are not looking for a traditional corporate CTO.

We are looking for a hands-on technical leader who still builds, ships, reviews architecture, and understands modern product engineering at scale.

This role is for someone who combines strong engineering judgment with startup execution ability — someone comfortable moving between backend architecture, real-time systems, infrastructure, product strategy, and technical leadership.

Pay

This role is currently structured as deferred compensation.

All current team members — including leadership, engineers, designers, and product teams — are currently working under the same structure while the company secures funding.

This is not unpaid work.

Compensation is intended to convert into a normalized salary structure post-funding, in addition to:

• Significant equity ownership
• Long-term token participation
• Founding-level influence over the company and platform

Schedule

OleOle is based in Austin, Texas, although the team currently operates remotely while the company completes its fundraising process.

We are a privately held company building a globally ambitious football platform with a distributed international team.