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.