Head of Technology / CTO

Hyphen Connect Limited; Hong Kong; On-site; HKD 2,000,000 - 4,200,000; Full time

Job summary

Hyphen Connect Limited is seeking a CTO to guide the next phase of building trading-grade infrastructure at the intersection of AI and digital finance. You will own the end-to-end technical stack and drive the evolution toward a broader cross-venue brokerage layer over time.

Lead a lean, high-performance team with a strong focus on security, resilience, low-latency data pipelines, and robust risk controls, while remaining hands-on.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building production crypto trading systems.
• Ownership of end-to-end trading features at scale.
• Hands-on leadership of small engineering teams.
• Strong focus on security and risk controls.
• Proven ability to design modular, scalable architectures.

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.
• Security & Resilience as Engineering Properties: Secure wallet signing flows, harden third-party integrations, implement real-time monitoring/incident readiness, and ensure safe degradation and recovery.
• Hands-on Architecture & Technical Leadership: Shape a lean, elite team of AI-native engineers who ship fast while maintaining correctness.

Skills

End-to-End ownership

Crypto trading tech

Architectural leadership

Security & resilience

AI-native development

Team leadership

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.