Startup CTO co-founder , hands on Rust, startup

Company Description

Travoom is currently paused as we focus entirely on building Ole Ole — a football-focused social network, messaging platform, and sports super app designed for the world’s biggest sport. At the same time,  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:
Ole Ole is the fan engagement, social, messaging, and content platform;  is the commerce and travel experiences platform. Together, they are designed to create a complete football ecosystem for fans globally.

Chief Technology Officer (CTO) – Founding Technical Leadership Role. We are not looking for a traditional corporate CTO. This role is for someone who combines strong engineering judgment with startup execution ability — someone comfortable moving between backend architecture, real‑time systems, infrastructure, product strategy, and technical leadership. The role may evolve into a co‑founder‑level position for the right person.

Ole Ole is building a football-focused social network and super app combining real‑time social feeds and microblogging, messaging and mobile communication, Tik Tok‑style short‑form video, live scores and sports engagement, AI‑powered translation and football history, rewards, payments, and future crypto infrastructure. You will define the long‑term technical architecture while also helping build and ship the platform alongside the engineering team. We are not looking for a CTO who has spent the last 20 years only managing meetings, vendors, and process;

we are looking for someone who still codes, still understands systems deeply, and still enjoys building.

• 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, trade‑offs, 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.

• 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.

• 7–15+ years of software engineering and technical leadership experience, ideally within startups or high‑growth consumer technology platforms.
• 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.
• Experience building or operating one or more of the following: social feeds and microblogging systems, messaging or real‑time communication platforms, Tik Tok‑style video or media infrastructure, financial, wallet, fintech, or gambling infrastructure, AI‑powered consumer products, large‑scale SEO or content infrastructure.
• Ability to make pragmatic technical trade‑offs balancing scalability, performance, speed, maintainability, and operational simplicity.
• Experience leading and mentoring…