Founding CTO / Technical Lead – Messenger & Stablecoin Payments

Founding CTO / Technical Lead – Messenger & Stablecoin Payments Location: Remote Engagement: Full-time or fractional-to-full-time Company: Ihsan Website: Ihsan.com SocialMedia: https://www.instagram.com/sultansamuelaziz/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@sultansamuelaziz Core stack: React Native, TypeScript, Go, PostgreSQL, Solana About Ihsan Ihsan is building a global messenger and super app designed to support a strong, connected and economically empowered Muslim community. Our next major product is Ihsan Pay: a self-custodial stablecoin payment system designed to feel as simple as a modern bank account. Users will be able to: • Hold stablecoins through embedded self-custodial wallets • Send money directly inside messenger conversations • Pay other users and merchants through QR codes • Accept payments in physical stores and online • Buy and sell stablecoins through integrated partners • Fund and use a stablecoin-connected payment card • Recover their accounts without managing complicated seed phrases We are looking for a senior technical leader to own the architecture, security and engineering execution of Ihsan Pay while strengthening the wider Ihsan technology platform. The role As Founding CTO / Technical Lead, you will be responsible for the long-term technical direction of Ihsan. You will work directly with the founders, lead the existing messenger engineering team and supervise the engineers building Ihsan Pay. This is a hands-on leadership role. You should be able to make high-level architectural decisions, review security-critical code and personally investigate difficult technical problems. You will not be expected to build every component yourself. Your responsibility is to ensure that the right system is designed, the right people are hired and the product is built securely and reliably. Your responsibilities • Own the overall technical architecture of the Ihsan platform • Design and review the architecture of Ihsan Pay • Lead and supervise the internal engineering team • Evaluate and select infrastructure providers such as Privy, Turnkey, Sumsub, Rain, Helius and on/off-ramp partners • Ensure Ihsan Pay remains genuinely self-custodial • Define wallet-signing, account-recovery and key-export architecture • Establish engineering, security, testing and documentation standards • Review backend, mobile and blockchain code • Design systems capable of scaling from the MVP to millions of users • Ensure clear separation between user funds, company systems and partner-controlled financial services • Build procedures for transaction reconciliation, incidents and provider failures • Recruit and mentor additional engineers • Manage infrastructure, deployment, observability and disaster recovery • Coordinate independent security audits and penetration testing • Translate the product vision into a practical technical roadmap • Communicate technical decisions clearly to non-technical founders and stakeholders Initial priorities During the first phase, you will: 1. Review the existing Ihsan messenger architecture and codebase. 2. Define the technical architecture for Ihsan Pay. 3. Select the embedded-wallet and blockchain infrastructure. 4. Supervise a proof of concept for self-custodial USDC transfers over Solana. 5. Design chat payments, QR payments and merchant-payment requests. 6. Establish a secure wallet-recovery and key-export model. 7. Review Sumsub, on-ramp and Rain card integrations. 8. Recruit or supervise the founding payments engineer. 9. Produce a documented roadmap from prototype to production. Required experience • 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 • Strong backend and distributed-systems knowledge • Experience with secure, high-availability consumer platforms • Strong understanding of payment systems, financial infrastr