Chief Technology Officer

VESTER

Location: Remote / flexible

Type: Full-time, founding team

Reports to: Co-founders

We're originally an NYC team, incubated and backed by a Seattle-based VC fund.

Title is open: Chief Technology Officer, Chief Engineering Officer, or Founding Engineer with a path to the C-suite. We care about the ownership, not the label.

Why VESTER exists

Our co-founder's parents are Romanian immigrants. They came here, worked, raised a family, and stayed loyal to the same grocery chain, the same pharmacy, and the same handful of brands, week after week, for twenty years.

Those companies grew on that money. Their stock went up. Shareholders got wealthier.

Her parents got points.

Our other co-founder's family is from the suburbs of Chicago. Different family, same story: the same stores, the same brands, years of loyalty, and points to show for it. That is when we realized this isn't just an immigrant story. It is an everyday American problem. People spend two decades funding the companies they buy from, and every dollar of the value they create flows to whoever happened to own the stock. The customer gets a coupon and a thank-you for their loyalty.

We are former equity derivatives traders from Société Générale. We spent our careers on the side of the market where ownership compounds, and we know how the plumbing works.

What VESTER does

VESTER gives public companies the infrastructure to reward their customers with fractional shares of their own stock instead of points. Same marketing dollars, different outcome: the customer stops being a source of revenue and becomes an owner. For a lot of American families, the brands they already shop at every week are the most realistic path they have into the market.

They've shopped at your brand for over twenty years. We want to be the reason they own a piece of it.

Underneath that idea is real infrastructure, built on regulated brokerage rails and delivered through the brand's existing app. It has three pieces: a consumer application where customers see and understand what they own, an enterprise platform for the brands funding these programs, and the integration layer that connects both to our brokerage, custody, and compliance partners. We are pre-seed, pre-revenue, and right now all in on launching our first pilot.

The role

You will be the person accountable for everything VESTER ships.

This is a founding role. There is no existing team to manage. On day one there is a prototype, a roadmap with real regulatory deadlines on it, and a set of architectural decisions waiting for someone qualified to make them. You will write code, choose the stack, talk to vendors, make the build-versus-buy calls, and then hire and lead the team that scales it.

What you'll own

The consumer product. A mobile-first application where customers see what they own, watch it grow, and understand what they hold. That includes onboarding, identity verification flows, portfolio views, and App Store approval in a category that requires care.

The enterprise platform. A dashboard for the brands funding these programs, covering reporting, program configuration, member-data ingestion, CRM integration, and a white-label SDK for partners who want the experience inside their own app.

The team. Defining the engineering culture, making the first hires, and deciding what we build ourselves versus what we buy or automate. We run deliberately lean and rely heavily on tooling and AI-assisted development. We would rather have four exceptional engineers than fifteen good ones.

What we're looking for

None of this is a rigid checklist. If most of it sounds like you but the title doesn't quite fit, tell us anyway. We'd rather have that conversation than miss you over a job description.

What matters most:

Experience building in regulated financial environments. You've shipped production systems where compliance was a design input, including KYC/AML pipelines, auditability, PII handling, and SOC 2, and you've worked directly with counsel and compliance teams without needing a translator.

Direct experience with brokerage or securities infrastructure. You've integrated against brokerage, clearing, custody, or transfer-agent APIs, and you understand account structures, order flow, settlement, corporate actions, and tax reporting well enough to design around how they actually behave.

Both sides of the product. You've shipped a consumer-facing application and an enterprise B2B platform. You know a good mobile app and an enterprise integration are different disciplines, and you've done both.

Founding-stage judgment. You're comfortable being the entire engineering function for a while, and you can tell the difference between a decision worth agonizing over and one worth making in ten minutes.

A real interest in markets. You don't need a finance background, but you should care about how capital markets work and who they work for right now.

Nice to have:

Experience taking a fintech product through partner or regulatory diligence

Familiarity with card-linked transaction data (Plaid, Fidel, or similar)

Exposure to tokenized-asset or distributed-ledger infrastructure. It matters for our longer-term roadmap, but we don't expect it on day one.

Prior technical leadership at a startup that made it from prototype to real customers

Who you'll work with

Both founders come off the same trading floor. Our CEO traded exotic equity derivatives, structured notes, equity linked noted, built our initial prototype, and today leads our sales conversations with brands. Our co-founder was on the Delta One desk: secured financing, securities lending, total return swaps, and later rebuilt the custodian architecture at the bank.

We're early enough that these labels barely hold. Both of us do whatever the day needs, from writing code to closing partners.

We know these markets and these instruments at the level of people who were paid to be right about them. We need someone who can build the product with the same rigor.

Behind us is a group of advisors who have held senior roles at institutions including Goldman Sachs, Prudential, JP Morgan, Société Générale, along with operators from the loyalty and enterprise software worlds, including the founder of the company that pioneered stock-based loyalty rewards.