Chief Technology Officer

About the role

Fixa is building the HR and financial infrastructure for Africa's informal and blue-collar workforce. Our platform supports businesses in construction, manufacturing, agriculture, and other labor-intensive sectors with powerful tools for workforce management, payroll, payments, and financial services. We are looking for a CTO to build Fixa's engineering function from founding-team scale to Series A - and ideally Series B - scale of 100,000+ users. Personally hands-on through the first 12 months, in the weeds solving problems alongside the team, with the judgment to know when to shift to a leadership-heavy posture. Anchor the architectural decisions that compound into scalable infrastructure and multi-country rollout - starting with a stable HR platform, expanding through banking and payment rails, and laying the foundation for Fixa to become a fintech institution.

Responsibilities

• Outcomes (12-18 months)
• Strong product reliability - driving customer-reported defects toward zero.
• Customer-reported bug count tracked quantitatively, trending sharply downward month over month.
• Reworked code rate tracked as a primary code-health metric, trending down.
• Code review enforced. Automated test coverage thresholds in place.
• SLOs are defined and actively enforced against the existing observability stack
• Multi-tenant architecture evolution and multi-country scale.
• Own the architectural decision and migration path from per-tenant MySQL toward row-level or hybrid multi-tenancy as customer count scales. Core to the acumen and responsibility of the role.
• Ensure infrastructure can support the migration without a stop-the-world rewrite.
• Architect the Country layer for cross-border expansion.
• API platform and partner integrations.
• Architect and ship internal APIs at production quality - specifically enabling Fixa to build and launch a credit scoring API as a product offering.
• Integrate with external partner APIs seamlessly across payment rails, KYC, banking, and identity.
• Build the abstraction layer, so adding a new country or provider is a plug-in, not a rewrite.
• Data infrastructure and data quality.
• Clean, trustworthy data across production and analytics, on infrastructure built to scale.
• Articulated, executable data plan - covering ingestion, storage, modeling, quality controls, and partner data exchange. (Candidates will be asked to present a draft data plan in the Phase 3 technical assessment.)
• Lean, AI-empowered engineering team built and operational.
• Personally own assessment, sourcing, interviewing, and building of the founding engineering team.
• Productivity measurement systems live - output metrics, code health, and engineer effectiveness. Input methods and guardrails are defined upfront.
• What You Have

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional software engineering, predominantly in JavaScript/Node.js or TypeScript as primary backend language.
• Must have 3+ years of experience in startup or scaleup environments & 4+ years in upper engineering management
• Must have Fintech transaction systems experience at scale. You have built or materially contributed to systems processing hundreds of thousands of transactions.
• Previously shipped production systems on AWS (Lambda / API Gateway serverless patterns strongly preferred).
• Worked with MySQL or comparable relational DBs at multi-tenant scale.
• Must have Frontend depth in React
• Must have awareness and architectural understanding of Flutter or a comparable mobile framework
• Hands-on Flutter experience is a plus
• Strong Preferences
• API architecture and integration depth. You have built APIs consumed at production scale; has integrated multiple third-party providers in production.
• Platform architecture - multi-tenancy and AWS serverless. Production experience with both, with opinions on the trade-offs.
• Data infrastructure and quality discipline. You have owned production data platforms end-to-end.
• Mobile banking and payment rails experience.
• AI-native engineering posture. Personal use, defensible point of view, team enablement capability.
• A Startup mentality. Flexible, nimble, comfortable in ambiguity.
• Product instinct. Co-owns product calls. Cares what customers need, not what's technically interesting.
• Must be a Hands-on technical operator who still enjoys the weeds. Codes today will be in the codebase in month 11.
• A Proven team builder. You have personally hired and managed engineers, ideally in early-stage or resource-constrained contexts.

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