(Preferred Candidates from Canada or the US)
Company Description
Renda is a Canadian based AI-native neobank reimagining how individuals and small businesses manage money. Powered by large language models, Renda delivers a real-time, conversational banking experience that automates finances, personalizes insights, and simplifies cash flow—enabling users to move faster and grow smarter.
We’re building a full-stack, autonomous banking platform where intelligent agents handle financial operations, insights, and decision-making seamlessly. Renda is part of NVIDIA Inception, a member of two leading Canadian incubators, and advised by experienced angels and operators across fintech, AI, and infrastructure.
We are an 8-person team spanning AI, data, engineering, growth, and design. We have a working MVP, are actively integrating core banking APIs, and are preparing for launch—making this a rare opportunity to join at a critical inflection point right before scale.
https://www.fintech.ca/2025/10/28/renda-builds-canadas-first-conversational-ai-powered-bank/
What we are looking for
We’re looking for a hands-on, deeply technical CTO (part-time) to lead Renda’s engineering and technology strategy as a founding executive. We currently have a technical co-founder acting as CTO, who will transition into a Founding Engineer and Principal Architect role, while remaining active at the board level. This transition is designed to bring in a highly experienced fintech engineer to assume the CTO role as we enter our final pre-launch phase.
Renda is late-stage and has already built the majority of its core infrastructure. The incoming CTO will step into an existing system and focus on strengthening, scaling, and hardening what’s already been built, making key architectural decisions, tying together different engineering domains, and working closely with the leaders across AI, backend, and product engineering.
This is not a purely managerial role. You will architect, build, and ship alongside a strong team of engineers, including a Head of AI & Data and multiple full-stack engineers. You will own the end-to-end technical vision while ensuring the platform meets the reliability, security, and compliance standards required of a regulated fintech product.
You should have direct experience with banking or financial infrastructure, complex API integrations, and building production-grade systems where security, scalability, and correctness are non-negotiable.
Roles and Responsibilities
- Own and define Renda’s technical architecture, infrastructure, and engineering roadmap
- Act as a hands-on technical leader, contributing code and reviewing critical systems
- Lead and mentor an existing engineering team (mobile, backend, AI, data)
- Oversee integrations with banking partners, payments, EFT, Interac, card issuing, and KYC providers (ongoing)
- Design and scale secure, resilient backend systems for a regulated fintech environment
- Ensure best practices across security, encryption, data privacy, and compliance
- Collaborate closely with the CEO, Head of AI & Data, Product, Growth, and Design
- Establish engineering processes that balance startup speed with production-grade quality
- Prepare the platform for go-to-market, audits, and future scale
- Represent technology decisions in discussions with investors, partners, and regulators when needed
Requirements
- Senior-level engineering background
- Strong hands-on experience with TypeScript, Node.js, and modern backend architectures
- Proven experience building and scaling fintech or regulated financial systems
- Direct experience with banking integrations, payments, ledgers, or financial APIs
- Strong understanding of security, encryption, compliance, and risk in financial products
- Experience leading engineering teams while remaining deeply technical
- Comfort operating in an early-stage, ambiguous, fast-moving environment
- Ability to balance product velocity with long-term technical soundness
Technical Stack
- Frontend / Mobile: React Native (Expo)
- Backend: Node.js + NestJS (TypeScript)
- Cloud: AWS (Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, RDS, CloudFront, API Gateway, Cognito)
- Data & Caching: Postgres, DynamoDB, Redis
- APIs: Secure REST APIs, JWT, OAuth 2.0
- DevOps: Docker, CI/CD pipelines
- AI Systems: Collaboration with agentic AI, LLM-driven workflows, and data pipelines
Benefits
- Having an ownership stake in an early high growth startup
- Flexible part-time working hours & remote-friendly culture.
- Ownership of end-to-end features in a fast-moving environment.
- Opportunity to help build the foundational infrastructure of a new Canadian AI neobank.
- Modern tech stack, high autonomy, and the ability to influence architecture and product direction.