Founding CTO / Technical Lead

Founding CTO / Technical Lead – Messenger & Stablecoin Payments

Full-time or fractional-to-full-time/Company: Ihsan

Ihsan is building a global messenger and super app to support a strong, connected and economically empowered Muslim community. Their next product, Ihsan Pay, is a self-custodial stablecoin payment system embedded into the messenger for chat payments, QR payments, merchant acceptance, on/off-ramps and a card.

Responsibilities:

- Own the overall technical architecture of the Ihsan platform and define the Ihsan Pay architecture
- Lead and supervise the internal engineering team and recruit/mentor additional engineers
- Ensure Ihsan Pay remains genuinely self-custodial; define wallet-signing, recovery and key-export models
- Review backend, mobile and blockchain code; establish engineering, security, testing and documentation standards
- Design systems for scaling from MVP to millions of users and ensure separation between user funds and company/partner systems
- Manage infrastructure, deployment, observability, reconciliation, incident response and disaster recovery
- Coordinate independent security audits and penetration testing

Requirements:

- At least 8 years of professional software-engineering experience
- Previous experience as a CTO, VP Engineering, Head of Engineering, principal engineer or technical architect
- Experience leading and hiring engineering teams and willingness to remain technically hands-on
- Strong backend and distributed-systems knowledge; experience with secure, high-availability consumer platforms
- Strong understanding of payment systems, financial infrastructure or digital assets and of application security/incident response
- Experience designing systems involving APIs, webhooks, queues, reconciliation and idempotency; experience taking products to production scale

Nice to have:

- Experience with consumer fintech, payments, remittance, wallets or neobanking
- Experience with Solana, stablecoins or blockchain payment infrastructure
- Familiarity with Privy, Turnkey, Web3Auth, Fireblocks or MPC wallets
- Experience integrating KYC, on/off-ramp or card-issuing providers
- Experience with React Native, TypeScript, Go and PostgreSQL
- Experience with messaging or real-time communication systems and scaling to millions of users
- Previous founding-engineer or early-stage CTO experience; understanding of self-custody vs legal control over funds

Stack:

React Native, TypeScript, Go, PostgreSQL, Solana

Benefits:

- Shape a new messenger and payment ecosystem from an early stage
- Own major architectural decisions and build technology for meaningful global impact
- Lead and grow the future engineering organization
- Competitive compensation and meaningful long-term equity participation

📩 Apply