Founders Factory
Technical Co-Founder, CTO (Project Neo)
We're building the most powerful growth engine for African startups and their founders.
Founders Factory Africa (FFA) is unlike any place else you’ve ever worked. We are venture builders dedicated to solving some of Africa’s biggest challenges and capitalizing on it’s incredible potential by leveraging market and tech opportunities. Over the next five years, we’ll build 40 businesses from scratch and scale 100 existing growth-stage ventures through our venture development programs. Backed by leading corporates, such as Standard Bank – the continent’s largest bank – we have access to their vast resources, infrastructure, and expertise and will bring those to bear for all our ventures and entrepreneurs. Starting with FinTech and HealthTech, FFA will expand our focus as we grow, adding other sectors that include retail, transportation, energy, and education.
Our Culture
Our goals are audacious, and we want to work with people who share our passion for pursuing transformation at scale. We believe that good ideas can come from anywhere - not just the top - and we love to build our way out of uncertainty. At FFA, you will work with and meet outstanding and diverse talent from across the continent and help us build a collaborative, inclusive, and supportive network. You will work faster (and learn faster) than you ever have before.
With offices in Johannesburg and London, we are building an ambitious, talented, and passionate team, ensuring that Founders Factory Africa is the continent’s best partner for founders.
What is Neo?
Artificial intelligence is changing the way financial services companies work - redefining everything from the way they interact with customers to how they deal with fraud. But most traditional institutions are falling behind, unable to adopt artificial intelligence due to two core problems: access to quality training data, and access to high-caliber talent. Neo is building the only full stack AI platform focused on the unique challenges of the financial services industry. With a first client and initial investor already in place, Neo is ready to redefine how global financial institutions think about AI.
This Role:
We are looking for a business-focused, entrepreneurial CTO to join the founding team. As the CTO, you will act as a co-founder, taking a leading role in the initial prototyping and market validation, and then heading up all aspects of product design, technical architecture, and technical development as we prepare to launch the venture into market.
Responsibilities
- Setting a clear vision for the direction of the product and Neo’s technical team
- Oversee all technical aspects of both the product and company, including technical strategy, technology blueprint, hiring and retaining talent and best practices & technology stacks.
- Manage the end-to-end technology execution
- Ensure consistent best practices, processes, and procedures for software development, quality assurance, and maintenance
- Be an active and collaborative member of the leadership team, working closely with the CEO/co-founder to identify risks, opportunities and develop strategic direction.
- Take charge of platform development, owning the engineering budget and making key decisions on technical architecture.
- Deliver the MVP, enabling our venture to start serving early customers.
- Build the engineering function by hiring the right people and embedding a great working culture.
Technical Requirements
- A solid foundation in computer science, with competencies in algorithms, data structures, and software design
- Ability to design machine learning systems, including research and implementation of ML algorithms, tools, and learning applications.
- Extensive experience building secure systems that store commercially sensitive data
- Good working knowledge of API design and general software design (e.g. Python, Java, C++, SQL, NoSQL)
- Strong understanding of enterprise-level integration and orchestration services.
- Good understanding of leveraging available cloud base services and existing ML platforms such as AWS SageMaker using Tensorflow or Google AutoML to avoid reinventing the wheel.
- Thorough understanding of containerisation enabled microservices and clear deployment pipeline strategy of such services.
Product Delivery Experience
- A high degree of user empathy and ability to test, learn and iterate based on user feedback
- Through understanding of Agile methodology and implementation thereof.
- Experience building products with a good degree of internal back-office processing workflows, especially involving QA/QC
- Understanding of tool like JIRA, GIT, Story Map
Strategic Competency
- Previous startup experience is a plus, as is experience working with distributed teams;
- Ability to attract and build a best-in-class engineering team
- Engineering management experience in a high-growth startup or medium-sized product-focused tech company
- Be enthusiastic about defining and cultivating a product-oriented engineering culture that instills a spirit of continuous improvement
- Strong communication skills - you’ll be sharing the results of analyses, and discussing technical problems, with a variety of technical and non-technical audiences
- Thrive in uncertainty - ideally in an agency business and/or startup environment
- Appetite for experimenting with new technologies and tools to drive innovation and creativity
Non-Negotiables
- Sheer resilience and appreciation for failure
- Relentlessly resourceful and creative problem solving
- High risk tolerance and boundless ambition
- A collaborative approach and willingness to be wrong
Benefits
- This is a rare chance to become a founder of a high-growth venture and receive equity commensurate with the position
- Growth: Work with and meet exceptional talent. Learn faster than you ever have before.
- Autonomy: Freedom to execute and build a business, not just a product.
- Network: Founders Factory Africa is part of the strongest global network for startup founders. Our relationships with corporate executives, established entrepreneurs, and funders is unparalleled.
Founders Factory Africa provides a rare opportunity to join a team of world-class thinkers, entrepreneurs, and creators. We provide the freedom and excitement of early-stage startups but the stability and resources of a large organisation. Founders Factory Africa has global ambitions, and you’ll play a key role in our future success.
This role is a once in a lifetime opportunity to join a high-growth organization as part of the founding team and to help shape the future of Africa’s startup ecosystem.
Founders Factory partners with the world’s best founders and corporates to build, fund and scale ambitious startups worldwide. We’re live in London, New York, Paris and Johannesburg.
- Founded
- Founded 2015
- Employees
- 51-200 employees
- Industry
- Professional Services
Chief Technology Officer (CTO)