CTO / Founding Engineer

Full-time · Nairobi (hybrid) or remote within ±3h of EAT

Hekima AI is a live product with real learners and a mission much bigger than its team: AI literacy for every Kenyan. As founding engineer you will own the entire platform — the web learning platform at hekima-ai.org, the Android app, the AWS backend, Rafiki (our multi-model AI tutor), and the M-Pesa payment rails — and shape every technical decision on the road from our first thousand learners to a million.

What you will do

• Own the platform end to end: the Next.js web platform, the Expo (React Native) Android app, and the AWS serverless backend.
• Build for the real Kenya: low-end Android phones, 3G data, offline-friendly lessons, and features that respect a student’s data bundle.
• Evolve Rafiki, our multi-model AI tutor — model routing, cost control, and answer quality in both English and Kiswahili.
• Ship the WhatsApp learning bot — our most important unbuilt surface. Many of our learners will never install an app.
• Keep payments boringly reliable: Pesapal and M-Pesa flows that thousands of learners trust with their money.
• Set the engineering culture for everyone we hire after you: pragmatic, measured, learner-first.

What we are looking for

• 5+ years building and shipping production software, with real products you can show us.
• Strong TypeScript across the stack — we run Next.js, React Native (Expo), and Node on AWS — or clear proof you master new stacks fast.
• You have integrated LLM APIs into real features and you instinctively think about cost per request, latency, and fallbacks.
• Comfortable owning infrastructure alone: deploys, monitoring, security, and user data — there is no platform team behind you.
• You ship well under constraint: low bandwidth, low-end devices, small budgets, tight timelines.
• Based in Nairobi, or working remotely within ±3 hours of East Africa Time with regular Nairobi time on the ground.

Nice to have (not required)

• M-Pesa Daraja or Pesapal integration experience.
• Working Kiswahili.
• Ed-tech, WhatsApp Business API, or offline-first sync experience.
• You have been employee #1–5 somewhere before — and want to do it again.

What we offer

• A true founding seat: meaningful equity plus a salary calibrated to our stage — discussed openly in the first conversation.
• Total ownership of architecture and technical direction.
• A live product with real users to build on — not a blank page.
• The clearest mission you will ever work on: Akili kwa Wote — intelligence for everyone.