Founding Technology Officer (FTO)

Job Title: Founding

(Founding Technology Officer)

Location:

Role Overview

Founding Technology Officer (FTO)

hands-on leadership role

Key Responsibilities

1. Founding Technology Vision

• Define and own the

  technology vision, architecture, and roadmap

  .
• Make critical early-stage decisions on

  tech stack, infrastructure, and architecture

  .
• Balance speed, scalability, and cost in all technical decisions.

2. Product & Platform Ownership

• Build and oversee:
• Customer mobile apps (Android / iOS)
• Partner & internal dashboards
• Backend systems, APIs, and databases
• Lead MVP development and rapid iteration cycles.
• Ensure product stability, performance, and reliability.

3. Hands-on Engineering & Execution

• Actively contribute to coding, architecture, and problem-solving in early stages.
• Set up development workflows, repositories, CI/CD pipelines, and environments.
• Ensure clean, maintainable, and scalable codebase from day one.

4. Team Building & Engineering Culture

• Hire and mentor the first engineering hires.
• Establish engineering best practices, coding standards, and documentation.
• Build a

  high-ownership, execution-focused engineering culture

  .

5. Scalability, Security & Reliability

• Design systems that can scale with increasing users, orders, and transactions.
• Implement security best practices, data protection, and access controls.
• Ensure uptime, monitoring, logging, backups, and disaster recovery.

6. Founder & Stakeholder Collaboration

• Work closely with founders on:
• Business strategy
• Product prioritization
• Investor and board discussions
• Translate business needs into technical execution plans.
• Represent technology confidently in investor and partner meetings.

7. Vendor & Cost Optimisation

• Evaluate and manage cloud services, third-party tools, and vendors.
• Optimise infrastructure and development costs without compromising quality.

Required Skills & Experience

Technical Expertise

• Strong experience in startup or early-stage product development
• Experience in AI-native product development lifecycle is a huge plus.
• Proven ability to design scalable system architectures
• Hands-on experience with:
• Backend: TypeScript / Go / Python
• Databases: MySQL / PostgreSQL / MongoDB
• Cloud: AWS / GCP / Azure
• Mobile: Android & iOS (native or cross-platform like Flutter / React Native)
• Strong understanding of APIs, microservices, DevOps, and CI/CD

Leadership & Founder Mindset

• Builder mentality with ownership attitude
• Comfortable working with ambiguity and fast changes
• Strong communication with non-technical stakeholders
• Experience leading small, high-impact engineering teams

Preferred Background

• Experience in

  food delivery, hyperlocal, logistics, marketplace, or e-commerce platforms

• Previously worked as

  Founding Engineer, Tech Lead, Head of Engineering, or CTO

• Experience scaling a platform from

  MVP to growth stage

Compensation & Equity

• Competitive founding-stage salary

• Meaningful equity / ESOPs

• Long-term leadership role with strategic influence
• Opportunity to build and own the entire technology ecosystem