Job Description
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.