Chief Technology Officer

Please read before applying: This is a founding role with no salary at this stage. Compensation is equity only. Were looking for someone comfortable taking early-stage risk in exchange for long-term ownership.

About SambalPay

SambalPay is building a credit line and lending aggregation platform for Bharat users earning 12,00040,000/month. Loan sizes range from 2,000 to 2 lakhs. We serve salaried workers, self-employed individuals, gig workers, and thin-file customers who are new to formal credit or underserved by traditional lenders.

We are not building growth-at-any-cost lending. We are building regulated lending infrastructure with:

• Transparent loan journeys (no hidden logic)
• Structured, EMI-based repayment
• Real NBFC partnerships with compliant capital flow
• Responsible underwriting from day one
• Strong control over defaults and risk

You will be accountable for:

• Architecture that wont break at scale (from 10k to 1lac users)
• Compliance built into the system, not bolted on later.
• Risk and fraud controls designed as core primitives.
• Shipping fast without creating irreversible tech debt.

Lending Lifecycle Platform (end-to-end)

Design and implement the complete loan journey:

• Mobile-first onboarding + KYC orchestration
• Bureau integrations
• Alternative data integrations (where needed)
• Underwriting rules engine v1 (explainable + auditable)
• Loan approval + limit assignment logic
• Disbursal triggers
• EMI schedule generation
• Repayment tracking + delinquency states
• Collections workflow logic (system-level)
• Internal admin/ops dashboard

Non-negotiable: auditable, modular, and NBFC-compliance compatible.

Payments & Transaction Integrity

Build payments that are reliable, traceable, and safe:

• UPI disbursal flows
• UPI + mandate-based repayments (as applicable)
• IMPS/alternate fallbacks (where required)
• Webhook listeners + payment confirmations
• Idempotency, retries, reconciliation
• Internal ledger layer + settlement reporting

Goal: transactions cannot fail silently; everything is traceable.

NBFC / Bank Integrations & Multi-Partner Routing

SambalPay is partner-led (not a balance-sheet lender initially). You will:

• Integrate partner APIs and/or routing mechanisms
• Build partner-level data isolation
• Enable loan book reporting + settlement/reconciliation reporting
• Design for multi-partner routing without rebuilding core systems

Risk, Underwriting & Fraud Infrastructure

Lending companies die due to weak risk. You will:

• Build a rule-based risk engine (v1)
• Design an extensible decisioning system (ML-compatible later)
• Implement baseline fraud detection
• Create early delinquency signal tracking
• Ensure all decisioning is explainable and audit-ready

Security, Reliability & Compliance-by-Design

Implement security and reliability foundations:

• Encryption in transit and at rest
• RBAC (role-based access control)
• Immutable audit logs
• Secure API design + credential management
• Secure cloud configuration (AWS/GCP)
• Monitoring, alerting, backups, disaster recovery
• Defined RTO/RPO

Execution Roadmap

Phase 1: Zero to MVP (03 months)

• Define architecture + set up cloud infrastructure
• Build core lending engine + admin panel
• Integrate payments sandbox + partner sandbox APIs
• Monitoring/logging in place

Outcome: internal MVP simulating full loan lifecycle.

Phase 2: MVP to Live (36 months)

• Production-grade infra
• Live disbursals + repayments
• Bureau integration active
• Risk engine v1 in production
• Reconciliation + fraud baseline

Outcome: real users and disbursals with controlled risk.

Phase 3: Live to Scale (618 months)

• Asynchronous queues + event-driven processing
• Horizontal scaling + performance optimization
• Load/stress testing
• Analytics + data warehouse layer
• Infra cost control per borrower
• Multi-partner routing

Target: 1lac+ active borrowers without infra breakdown.

Experience (Must Have).

• 510 years in fintech / lending / payments (or equivalent depth)
• Strong backend engineering (Python / Node.js / Go)
• Cloud architecture (AWS or GCP)
• Experience integrating with financial institutions / APIs
• Comfort handling sensitive financial data and audit trails
• Understanding of lending lifecycle + repayment mechanics

Desired skills.

• Early-stage / founding engineer experience
• Built underwriting/decisioning systems
• Shipped fintech from MVP production users
• Exposure to collections systems
• Understanding of lending unit economics

This role is not for you if

• You need salary stability right now
• You prefer narrow ownership (only backend, only infra, etc.)
• You dont want accountability for compliance-by-design and risk outcomes

How to Apply

Send:

• A short note on why you want to build SambalPay (equity-only, founding risk)
• 12 examples of systems you shipped (payments, lending, risk, reconciliation, scale)
• Links to GitHub/architecture write-ups (if available)

Subject line: Founding CTO SambalPay [Your Name]