Head of Technology / CTO

Hyphen Connect; Hong Kong; On-site; HKD 1,200,000 - 2,400,000; Full time

Job summary

Hyphen Connect is hiring a CTO to lead the next phase of trading infrastructure for AI-enabled digital finance. You will architect secure, scalable systems, own the tech stack from wallet integration to execution, and grow a lean, AI-native engineering team of researchers and engineers.

You will balance performance, security, and reliability while shipping high-impact features for power users across multiple venues and protocols.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building production crypto trading systems and platforms.
• Proven track record delivering end-to-end, high-availability features.
• Experience leading small engineering teams while remaining hands-on.

Responsibilities

• Own the full technical stack of a trading-grade product for crypto markets.
• Architect risk controls, data pipelines, and security measures across the stack.
• Lead architecture decisions, code reviews, and rapid, correct shipping.

Skills

Crypto trading

System architecture

Leadership

Hands-on coding

Security & resilience

High-throughput

Latency optimization

Tools

Git

CI/CD pipelines

Observability stack

Job description

Our client is building next-generation products at the intersection of AI and digital finance.

A new financial layer is forming that rewrites these rules: self-custodial wallets, stablecoins, and on-chain markets. Stablecoins are becoming a practical global digital dollar, and wallets are evolving into modern global accounts—letting anyone hold and deploy capital directly, with transparency by default. In parallel, on-chain infrastructure has crossed a key threshold: fees are low enough, throughput is high enough, and reliability is strong enough to support trading-grade experiences on open networks.

We strongly believe this unlocks the next arena of global investing—where traders can invest, speculate, hedge, and express views across digital assets, synthetic exposures, and real-world assets with lower friction and a fairer market structure.

We are hiring a CTO to lead this next phase: architecting secure, scalable trading infrastructure for power users from day one, and growing it into a broader cross-venue brokerage layer over time.

Key Responsibilities

• End-to-End Technical Ownership: Own the full technical stack of a trading-grade product—from core wallet integration and trading UX, to execution reliability, real-time data pipelines, risk controls, and platform security.
• System Primitives for Trust: Architect predictable execution under volatility, high-integrity market data pipelines, and clear risk/margin engines. Build for failure as a default condition (network congestion, volatility spikes, degraded RPCs, adversarial environments) so the platform stays tradable when it matters most.
• Security & Resilience as Engineering Properties: Secure wallet signing flows, harden third-party integrations, implement real-time monitoring/incident readiness, and ensure the system degrades safely and recovers cleanly.
• Hands-on Architecture & Technical Leadership: Shape a lean, elite team of AI-native engineers who ship fast without sacrificing correctness. Set high engineering standards across instrumentation, code reviews, and iterative releases based on real trader behavior.

Requirements

Baseline Experience

• 5+ years building and shipping production systems in crypto trading environments (CEX, DEX, DeFi infrastructure, or on-chain trading applications).
• Proven track record of owning and delivering end-to-end, trading-grade features at scale.
• Experience leading small engineering squads or project teams while remaining hands-on by default.

Engineering Excellence & Production Discipline

• Strong modular architecture design capable of scaling smoothly with product complexity.
• Proven capability building resilient systems that handle traffic spikes, volatility, degraded dependencies, and partial failures.
• Rigorous production discipline: metrics, logs, tracing, alerting, safe fallbacks, and automated recovery paths.
• Demonstrated track record of optimizing latency, throughput, error rates, and system uptime.

Domain Expertise (Trading & Crypto)

• Strong mastery of derivatives and leverage mechanics: margin systems, liquidation triggers, funding rates, slippage, and position sizing.
• Deep familiarity with on-chain realities: transaction finality, network congestion, gas/fee volatility, and MEV/front-running mitigation.
• Experience integrating across venues and protocols where edge cases are frequent.
• Deep familiarity with high-throughput trading venues (such as Hyperliquid or equivalent protocols) is a strong plus.

Security & Trust Mindset

• Strong instincts around self-custody safety, key handling, and signature workflows that eliminate user error.
• Ability to audit, harden, and sandbox third-party dependencies (RPCs, bridges, indexers, data feeds).
• Adversarial approach to system design ("how can this break, be exploited, or fail under stress?").
• Proficient in driving security standards: threat modeling, audits, automated monitoring, and incident response playbooks.

Product & Leadership Instincts

• Ability to translate complex trader needs into crisp technical requirements and measurable performance outcomes.
• Preference for clean, explainable system behavior over hidden logic ("magic").
• Builder-first leadership: Willingness to architect, write code, review PRs, and ship critical paths directly.
• AI-Native Engineering: Daily use of AI coding/development tools to accelerate output while enforcing strict correctness.