Cto / Technical Co-founder

CTO / Technical Co-Founder MSA Trader | Remote-first, Africa-aligned | Equity + Salary

About MSA Trader

MSA Trader is building workflow and intelligence infrastructure for brokers, traders, and dealing desks operating in African and frontier fixed-income markets.

Frontier fixed-income workflows remain fragmented across WhatsApp, calls, emails, spreadsheets, pricing runs, and manual settlement processes. Valuable market intelligence is created every day in these workflows. Almost none of it is systematically captured.

The first product is a trading workflow platform — covering pricing, RFQs, order management, settlement coordination, and communication. The longer-term build is an intelligence layer that structures and surfaces proprietary market behaviour from the workflow itself.

We are early, focused, and building in a market where the infrastructure gap is real.

Why This Role Is Different

Most CTO roles involve joining a product after the main architecture has already been decided.

This is earlier and more important. The person joining now will define the architecture, data model, AI layer, and technical principles that this company may be built on for years. Their fingerprints will be on everything — the platform, the intelligence layer, the data governance model, the defensibility of the business.

The Current State

The platform has a working foundation built on Supabase (PostgreSQL, RLS, Edge Functions), React, and TypeScript, with early features across bond pricing, historical data, and user access. The build requires a co-founder who can assess what exists, strengthen what works, and make the decisions that will matter at scale.

You will not be inheriting a finished product. You will be shaping one.

What You Will Own

• Full technical architecture across the workflow platform and intelligence layer
• Backend, database, API, cloud infrastructure, and frontend systems
• Secure data models for trading workflows — pricing, execution, settlement, counterparty records
• AI-assisted workflow tooling and retrieval-based intelligence systems
• Data governance: separation, permissioning, encryption, auditability, and compliance-readiness
• Role-based access and permission structures across users, clients, and admin tiers
• Financial calculation accuracy — yield/price, curve analysis, and related logic
• Integrations with messaging, pricing, document, and execution systems
• Technical hiring as the team scales

First 90 Days

• Review the existing architecture and identify technical debt
• Assess and harden the Supabase / React / TypeScript foundation
• Define the target architecture for both products
• Strengthen data models across users, bonds, pricing, RFQs, orders, trades, settlement, clients, and counterparties
• Establish clear permissioning and data-separation principles
• Identify what should be rebuilt, retained, or deferred
• Define the first version of the intelligence layer architecture
• Prepare the platform for controlled user trials

What We Are Looking For

• Strong backend and systems instincts. You think about data architecture, scale, and security before you think about features.
• Experience building in regulated or high-trust environments — fintech, trading infrastructure, enterprise SaaS, or similar.
• Familiarity with AI/LLM systems in production: RAG, retrieval design, vector databases, memory boundaries, human-in-the-loop workflows. We want someone who has built with this stack and understands its failure modes.
• Comfort with complex, real-world data problems. The data in this market is messy, inconsistent, and often unstructured. That is not a blocker — it is the problem we are solving.
• Hands-on enough to build. Senior enough to architect. Willing to work in a market you may not know yet, and serious enough to learn it properly.
• Fixed-income experience is useful, not required. Domain knowledge can be acquired. Systems thinking at this level cannot. Curiosity about markets, however, is essential.

Technical Background — Relevant Experience

Full-stack engineering · Backend architecture · Database design · Cloud infrastructure · API development · AI and LLM systems · RAG and vector databases · Workflow automation · Event-driven architecture · Fintech or trading infrastructure · Data engineering · Security, permissions, and compliance · Messaging or communication systems

Who This Is Not For

This is not for someone looking for a narrow engineering management role, a short-term contract, or a purely feature-delivery position. It is for someone who wants to build, architect, challenge, and own the technical direction of a company from an early stage.

Compensation

A salary component, meaningful equity, and founder-level upside for the right person. We will discuss structures that reflect both current cash realities and the scale of what we are building.

Equity will be meaningful enough to reflect true technical co-founder contribution.

This is not a contractor role. We are looking for a long-term technical partner.

This is for someone who wants their work to matter beyond a feature release — someone who wants to help build infrastructure that could change how under-digitised capital markets operate.

To Apply

Reach out via LinkedIn or email with a short note on your background and what draws you to this specifically. No long cover letters required — just tell us what you have built and why this is interesting to you

<