Experienced Startup CTO possible co-founder role, hands on Rust, startup experience a must have

Company Description

Who We Are

Travoom is currently paused as we focus entirely on building OleOle --- a football-focused social network, messaging platform, and sports super app designed for the world's biggest sport.

At the same time, oleolesport.com continues to operate as our curated football travel and hospitality marketplace, offering premium fan experiences around the biggest matches and tournaments in the world.

Both platforms are strategically connected:

• OleOle is the fan engagement, social, messaging, and content platform
• oleolesport.com is the commerce and travel experiences platform

Together, they are designed to create a complete football ecosystem for fans globally.

What We're Building

OleOle is building a next-generation football platform combining:

• Social networking and microblogging
• Messaging and mobile calls
• TikTok-style short-form video
• Live scores and match experiences
• AI-powered football history and statistics
• Real-time global fan engagement

We believe football deserves its own dedicated platform --- not a small section buried inside general-purpose social networks.

Why It Matters

Football fandom is global, emotional, tribal, and active every day of the year. Yet today, the fan experience remains fragmented across disconnected social platforms, messaging apps, score apps, news sites, ticketing sites, and travel providers.

Why We're Different

oleolesport.com removes the complexity from planning football travel experiences by combining curated ticketing, hospitality, lodging, and travel experiences into one streamlined platform. OleOle extends that vision much further --- creating a football-first platform built specifically around fan identity, conversation, live interaction, creator content, and global football culture.

Job Description

We are not looking for a traditional corporate CTO. We are looking for a hands-on technical leader who still builds, ships, reviews architecture, and understands modern product engineering at scale. This role is for someone who combines strong engineering judgment with startup execution ability.

About the Role

OleOle is building a football-focused social network and super app. This role may evolve into a co-founder-level position for the right person. You will define the long-term technical architecture of the company while also helping build and ship the platform alongside the engineering team.

What We're Looking For

A product-first, systems-oriented technical leader who understands:

• Real-time social feeds and recommendation systems
• Messaging and event-driven infrastructure
• High-performance backend architecture
• Frontend/backend integration for modern consumer products
• Payments, wallet infrastructure, or financial systems
• AI infrastructure and data-driven products
• Scalability, reliability, and operational discipline

Key Responsibilities

• Define and lead the long-term technical architecture of the platform
• Lead backend architecture and infrastructure strategy using Rust-based systems
• Help build scalable systems supporting feeds, messaging, live updates, video, and data infrastructure
• Oversee engineering direction across backend, frontend, infrastructure, and product systems
• Partner closely with leadership on product and company strategy
• Establish engineering culture, hiring standards, and technical execution processes
• Work directly with engineers on architecture reviews, tradeoffs, and implementation decisions
• Help design future financial infrastructure including rewards, wallets, payments, and crypto-related systems
• Support AI-powered systems including translation, recommendation, search, and football history infrastructure
• Ensure scalability, reliability, performance, and security across all systems

Technical Areas Involved

• Rust backend infrastructure
• Real-time systems and asynchronous architecture
• APIs, event-driven systems, and distributed services
• Messaging and feed infrastructure
• Video and media systems
• AI and data infrastructure
• Payment and wallet systems
• SSR and SEO-focused architecture
• High-scale consumer product engineering

Compensation & Structure

This role is currently structured as deferred compensation. All current team members are currently working under the same structure while the company secures funding. Compensation is intended to convert into a normalized salary structure post-funding, in addition to:

• Significant equity ownership
• Long-term token participation
• Founding-level influence over the company and platform

Qualifications

Your Background

• 7--15 years of software engineering and technical leadership experience
• Strong hands-on engineering background with active involvement in architecture, systems design, and production codebases
• Significant experience building and scaling modern consumer platforms involving real-time systems, high concurrency, and large-scale user engagement
• Strong production Rust experience building asynchronous backend systems and distributed infrastructure
• Deep understanding of backend architecture, APIs, event-driven systems, databases, caching, and scalable infrastructure design
• Ability to make pragmatic technical tradeoffs balancing scalability, performance, speed, maintainability, and operational simplicity
• Experience leading and mentoring engineering teams while remaining deeply technical and hands-on

Strong Plus

• Experience with Rust-based consumer platforms
• Experience with distributed systems and event-driven architectures
• Experience with feeds, messaging, streaming, or recommendation systems
• Experience with payments, crypto, wallet infrastructure, or gambling systems
• Experience with AI infrastructure, search, recommendation, or translation systems
• Startup leadership experience building products from zero to one
• Existing network within startup, venture capital, or fundraising ecosystems
• Passion for football, sports media, or global fan communities

Additional Information

OleOle is based in Austin, Texas, although the team currently operates remotely while the company completes its fundraising process. We are a privately held company building a globally ambitious football platform with a distributed international team.