Founding Engineer

Somewhere; Remote; ZAR 80 000 - 100 000; Full time

Job summary

An innovative tech company in Johannesburg is seeking its first senior engineer. This critical role involves working closely with the CTO to advance their groundbreaking consumer crypto and social gaming products. Candidates should be passionate about coding, have experience in distributed systems, and be proficient in Typescript and Python. Successful applicants will have the opportunity to shape the product and engineering culture, with a hands-on approach to shipping weekly releases and mentoring peers.

Benefits

Massive ownership

Creative freedom

Collaborative environment

Qualifications

• A passion for coding, including side projects and hackathons.
• Ability to architect and implement distributed systems end-to-end.
• Fluency in Typescript, Python, and AWS.

Responsibilities

• Architect & build core systems integrating off-chain and on-chain.
• Ship product features weekly in a fast-paced environment.
• Mentor teammates and contribute to team culture.

Skills

Coding enthusiasm

Experience in distributed systems

Proficiency in Typescript

Proficiency in Python

AWS familiarity

Interest in consumer-scale crypto

Tools

Solana

EVM

Job description

Confidential Consumer Crypto / Social Gaming Company

Full-Time

Remote

About The Company

We are building a new information protocol designed to surface high-signal insights through social consensus — helping people make better decisions and enabling the world to share a more accurate perception of reality.
Our first product, launched in mid-2024, is a fast-growing quiz/trivia experience that uses “wisdom of the crowd” mechanics to deliver collectively generated answers. Since launch, it has earned recognition across the ecosystem, winning multiple global hackathons and grants.
But this is just the beginning. Our long-term vision spans a suite of gamified consumer experiences that gather high-quality social data and feed it into a composable reputation graph and information infrastructure. Think playful products with deep technical underpinnings, designed for massive consumer scale.
We are a small founding team of builders from both web2 and web3 — curious, ambitious, relentless, and deeply convinced that crypto will fundamentally reshape the world. We’re building like it matters because it does.

About The Role

We’re hiring our first senior engineer — a true founding team member who will work directly with the CTO to push the product forward, ship weekly, and meaningfully shape the next generation of our architecture, product direction, and engineering culture.
This is a hands‑on, high‑impact role. You’ll touch everything from distributed systems to on‑chain integrations, from architecting new features to advancing the core protocol.
If you want to build fast, experiment boldly, and help define the future of information discovery, you’ll love it here.

What You’ll Do

• Architect & Build Core Systems
• Design, build, and scale new services across both off‑chain and on‑chain environments.
• Help define the next generation of our architecture — distributed, robust, and built for speed.
• Evaluate tradeoffs, propose improvements, and chart the technical path ahead.
• Ship Product Features Weekly
• Our release cadence is fast. You’ll build new features, fix bugs, and iterate continuously.
• Improve existing applications across both backend and frontend surfaces.
• Hold a high bar for reliability, experimentation, and quality.
• Influence Product Direction
• Provide perspective on which product directions unlock the greatest user and ecosystem value.
• Help prioritize features and explore new user experiences, game mechanics, and data flows.
• Mentor & Lead
• As an early technical leader, you’ll help create a collaborative, high‑trust engineering culture.
• Mentor teammates, review code, and contribute to rituals that make the team stronger.
• Research & Experiment
• Explore new technologies across crypto, identity, data storage, bots, consumer UX, and more.
• Evaluate on‑chain identity protocols, messaging rails, cost‑efficient storage, and emerging developer tools.
• Bring creative energy to architecture discussions and product experiments.

Who You Are

• You love to code — not just professionally, but because it’s fun. Side projects, hackathons, experiments… bring them.
• You’re excited about crypto beyond DeFi, especially consumer‑scale use cases and new social primitives.
• You operate independently, move quickly, and don’t need hand‑holding.
• You can architect and implement distributed systems end‑to‑end.
• You’re fluent in Typescript, Python, and AWS, and have opinions on what the next‑generation stack should be — and why.
• You can balance speed with long‑term thinking: ship fast, but thoughtfully.

Bonus Skills

• Experience working with Solana, EVM, or other on‑chain ecosystems.
• Experience in gaming, trivia, or social consumer apps.
• Exposure to decentralized identity, verifiable data, or reputation systems.

Why Join

• Be part of the founding engineering team at a company building new primitives in social + crypto tech.
• Massive ownership and the chance to define both product and protocol direction.
• Work directly with founders who have built and scaled successful products in web2 and web3.
• Fast‑moving environment with weekly deployments, creative freedom, and meaningful autonomy.
• Build things people love while helping shape a more accurate and participatory information landscape.