Chief Technology Officer
ABOUT THE COMPANY
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.
ABOUT THE ROLE
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.
WHAT YOU WILL DO
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
Must Haves
- 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.
WHO YOU ARE
- 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.