CTO - Co founder 10+years || Hyderabad

🧠 Job Description: CTO - Backend Developer (

Location: Remote or Hyderabad (preferred)

Type: Full-time / Tech co founder - equity only - NO SALARY TILL WE RAISE seed funding

Level: Mid to Senior (10 + years experience)

🧩 Role Overview

We’re looking for a backend engineer who loves building clean, scalable APIs, but also has curiosity (and basic competence) around natural language processing and intelligent systems.

🔧 What You'll Do

• Build and maintain scalable APIs using FastAPI
• Design relational schemas using PostgreSQL for users, matches, profiles, and chat
• Implement and optimize real-time chat systems (using WebSockets or Firebase)
• Integrate LLMs via APIs (OpenAI, Claude, Cohere) to extract emotional & safety insights from chats
• Build and iterate text classification pipelines (toxicity detection, vibe scoring, ghosting patterns)
• Implement work/profile verification systems (e.g., email OTPs, LinkedIn screenshot check)
• Collaborate on matchmaking logic, including Operation Manmadha (our AI-enhanced compatibility algorithm)
• Build admin/moderation tools for trust, safety, and manual interventions

🛠️ Skills & Experience✅ Required

• 6+ years of backend development experience (preferably with Python & FastAPI)
• Deep understanding of REST API design, auth (JWT), and async architecture
• Experience with PostgreSQL and Redis (or similar cache systems)
• Familiarity with WebSockets or other real-time communication protocols
• Exposure to OpenAI/Cohere APIs or similar — able to build LLM-based pipelines
• Comfortable with prompt engineering, LLM outputs, and chaining logic
• Experience writing modular, testable code and working in CI/CD environments

🔍 Nice-to-Have

• Experience with Hugging Face Transformers, spaCy, scikit-learn, or PyTorch
• Exposure to chat risk classifiers, toxicity detection, or sentiment analysis
• Understanding of Gale-Shapley algorithm or other matchmaking logic
• Knowledge of Firebase for presence/chat or file storage
• Prior work in dating apps, mental health, or trust/safety tech

💡 Traits We’re Looking For

• You think like a product builder, not just an API writer
• You’re excited about LLMs, user trust, and emotional tech
• You write code that’s easy to read, easy to test, and easy to scale
• You’re proactive — suggesting improvements and not waiting for specs
• You care about making online dating safer, healthier, and more human

📦 What We Offer

• Chance to build India’s most thoughtful dating platform
• Work with a small, ambitious founding team with design, product, and film experience
• Freedom to experiment with cutting-edge AI
• A strong culture of autonomy, empathy, and no bullshit
• Competitive pay + equity (for long-term hires)

Tell us:

• One project you're proud of
• Your comfort level with AI integration
• Why Nova’s mission matters