CTO

CTO | Pesito 

Full-time · Cofounder-level equity · Kirkland, WA (Seattle area preferred, remote-friendly for the right person)

The one-liner

We're building the payment rail for the Americas. Pesito is a US→Mexico remittance app with a 1% fee capped at $1 and no FX markup — built for the people Western Union has overcharged for decades. Puente Railway is the infrastructure underneath it: a Rust/Go backend moving money over stablecoin rails on Solana, settling into real bank accounts on both sides of the border. Pesito is the first product on the rail. It won't be the last.

Why this role exists

Our founding team is strong on product, consumer experience, and the regulatory/banking side — we have the bank partnership, the licensing path in motion, and an app people want. What we need is a technical leader who has run money-moving infrastructure in production and can own the parts of the stack where "pretty good" isn't good enough. You'd be the technical authority in the room: with the team day-to-day, and with regulators, auditors, and investors when it counts.

What you'll own

• Production infrastructure, end to end. Kubernetes, Terraform + Crossplane IaC, ingress/routing, CI/CD, and our multi-cloud footprint (GCP + Azure). You decide what we run, where, and why — and you make it reproducible.

• Reliability for money movement. SLOs, observability, incident response, and on-call culture for a system where a dropped transaction is someone's rent. Five nines is the ambition; you build the path to it.

• Solana at production depth. RPC routing and provider redundancy, streaming ingestion (gRPC/WebSockets), transaction landing reliability under congestion, priority fee strategy, and hardening our Anchor programs to audit-readiness.

• Ledger correctness. Our double-entry ledger (Σ debits = Σ credits, always) with consistent-hash sharding, outbox delivery, and saga-based compensation. You've built or operated systems where idempotency and exactly-once semantics were non-negotiable.

• Custody and key management. MPC wallet infrastructure (we work with Turnkey- and Portal-class providers), signing latency, and the security posture around keys that control real balances.

• Security and compliance engineering. The technical side of our SOC 2 path, KYC/AML vendor integrations, and the audit trails and controls that money-transmitter examinations demand.

• Fiat rails at production quality. Bank APIs, ACH/RTP, account linking, card issuing, and Mexico-side rails (SPEI) — integrations that fail gracefully and reconcile cleanly.

• The engineering org. You'll set the bar for how we hire, review, and ship as the team grows past its founding engineers.

What you bring

• You've owned infrastructure for a production system that moved money, or something equally unforgiving (trading, payments, banking core, high-stakes marketplaces).

• Deep hands-on Kubernetes and infrastructure-as-code experience — you've been the person paged at 3am and the person who redesigned things so nobody gets paged at 3am.

• Real Solana production experience: you know why RPC routing strategy matters, what makes transactions fail to land, and how to build ingestion that doesn't drop events.

• Distributed-systems fluency: sharding, consensus trade-offs, outbox/saga patterns, and the discipline to keep a financial ledger provably correct.

• Comfort operating in a regulated environment — or the judgment and humility to learn fast alongside our compliance work.

• Founder energy. Pre-seed means ambiguity, ownership, and building with your own hands before you build a team.

No degree required. We hire on skill and character, full stop.

Nice to have

• Rust or Go in production. (Our stack: Rust + Go backend, PostgreSQL, Flutter clients.)

• Stablecoin settlement, on/off-ramp, or custody experience.

• SOC 2 / audit experience from the engineering side.

• Spanish. Our users, our market, and half our roadmap live in it.

Compensation

This is an equity-only role today — cofounder-level equity with standard vesting. We're pre-seed and closing our round this winter; salary begins when it closes. If that's disqualifying, we understand — but if you've been waiting for the right thing to bet on, this is a real stake in the rail, not a token grant.

Why now

• Banking partnership secured with a major US partner bank; money-transmitter licensing underway in our first state.

• Alpha launching with real users in our beachhead community in Washington State.

• Public launch targeted for April 2027, seed round closing this winter.

• A founding team that grew up in the communities we serve. Our CEO watched his grandfather get overcharged in remittance lines — this company is the answer to that.

How we work

Our motto is "Be your best self." We run on brutal honesty (delivered with care), integrity and ownership, acceptance, and relentless curiosity. We vet for empathy in every interview — including this one.

To apply: tell us about the hardest production system you've kept alive, and what you'd fix first about a cross-border payment rail.