Technical Co-Founder (Founding Engineer)

Technical Co-Founder & CTO

TruTrace Intelligence Ltd | Synesis | Founding Leadership Opportunity

About TruTrace Intelligence

TruTrace Intelligence is building Synesis, an AI-assisted digital investigation and intelligence platform designed for professional investigators, security teams, financial institutions, compliance professionals and corporate intelligence teams.

Investigations are often fragmented across browser tabs, spreadsheets, disconnected OSINT tools and multiple data providers. Analysts must manually collect information, establish relationships, validate sources and maintain an evidence trail across separate systems.

Synesis brings these activities into a unified investigative workspace, combining intelligence discovery, digital footprint analysis, infrastructure intelligence, relationship exploration, source provenance, case management and AI-assisted analysis.

Our initial focus is addressing investigative and intelligence challenges in African markets, with the ambition to build technology that can serve professional investigation and security teams internationally.

Where We Are Today

Synesis is well beyond the idea stage. A substantial working platform has been built, including investigation workflows, intelligence collection capabilities, graph-based analysis, case persistence, provenance controls and an emerging AI capability architecture.

We are now focused on strengthening the platform’s security, reliability, architecture and operational readiness while preparing for customer validation and commercial deployment.

What We’ve Built

Investigation workspace and case management

• Persistent investigation workspaces and case management.
• Entity management, source review and evidence organisation.
• Search history, execution history and investigation context.
• Source promotion with explicit analyst control.
• Audit records and provenance tracking.

OSINT and digital footprint intelligence

• Email footprint investigation.
• Username discovery and footprint analysis.
• Phone intelligence, subject to provider availability.
• Image-based public-source discovery and contextual comparison.
• Web and source discovery with analyst-led review and promotion.

Infrastructure and digital intelligence

• Domain and infrastructure investigation.
• WHOIS and historical WHOIS intelligence.
• DNS, historical DNS context and IP geolocation.
• Contextual pivots connecting entities, domains, infrastructure and sources.
• Provider-dependent enrichment and investigation workflows.

Relationship, timeline and narrative analysis

• Interactive investigative graph and relationship exploration.
• Entity and source connections with provenance.
• Timeline intelligence and activity reconstruction.
• Narrative discovery, source comparison and thematic analysis.
• Contextual investigation pivots and retained-source review.

AI-assisted investigation

• Copilot Ask and Insights capabilities.
• Source-grounded investigative context and analysis workflows.
• A shared capability registry and policy-enforced execution layer.
• A read-only entity-context capability and a mutating promotion capability with explicit approval controls.
• Structured execution limits, case-access enforcement and audit integration.

MCP-ready architecture

We have implemented an in-process, MCP-compatible adapter around the capability layer. The architecture is designed to expose approved Synesis capabilities through a controlled interface, supporting future integration with AI clients and carefully governed investigative agents.

The foundation includes typed tool schemas, central policy enforcement, server-side authorisation, bounded execution and an explicit approval lifecycle for consequential actions.

To be clear, an operational MCP server or external MCP transport has not yet been deployed. Autonomous investigative agents are also not currently implemented.

The Problem We’re Solving

Investigators and intelligence teams frequently work across disconnected tools that were not designed to support an end-to-end investigation.

The result is fragmented intelligence, duplicated effort, difficult source verification and limited continuity between collection, analysis and reporting.

Synesis aims to unify the investigative process: from discovering information and examining digital footprints to exploring relationships, preserving provenance and producing structured intelligence.

Our focus is not simply to aggregate more data. It is to help analysts investigate more coherently while preserving human oversight, traceability and control over consequential actions.

Who We’re Looking For

We are looking for a Technical Co-Founder & CTO who wants to help build and lead a long-term technology company—not simply deliver a list of features.

This is a founding leadership opportunity for someone who wants genuine ownership of the engineering direction, architectural decisions and technical evolution of the business.

You should be comfortable working with an existing codebase, evaluating architectural trade-offs, improving what has already been built and deciding what needs to change before the platform can scale.

Technical experience

Experience in several of the following areas would be valuable:

• Backend engineering: Python, FastAPI or Django, API design and service architecture.
• Frontend engineering: React, TypeScript and complex data-driven interfaces.
• Data and persistence: MongoDB, PostgreSQL, data modelling and relationship-oriented systems.
• AI and integration architecture: LLM integration, tool calling, structured schemas, MCP and controlled execution of AI capabilities.
• Security engineering: authentication, authorisation, tenant isolation, auditability and secure data access.
• Infrastructure: cloud deployment, CI/CD, observability, reliability and DevOps.
• Data intelligence: graph modelling, entity resolution, search, enrichment pipelines and third-party API integration.

You do not need to be an expert in every area. Architectural judgement, strong engineering fundamentals, ownership and the ability to learn quickly matter more than matching every technology on the list.

Experience in cybersecurity, OSINT, intelligence analysis, investigations, fintech, regtech, govtech or compliance would be a strong advantage.

What You’ll Do

As Technical Co-Founder & CTO, you will work directly with the founder to shape the product and build the engineering organisation.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Owning the technical architecture and long-term engineering roadmap.
• Reviewing and strengthening the existing codebase rather than rebuilding it unnecessarily.
• Leading security hardening, access-control improvements, reliability and production readiness.
• Developing a scalable architecture for intelligence collection, enrichment, graph analysis, provenance and case management.
• Advancing the capability and policy architecture that underpins AI-assisted investigation and future MCP integrations.
• Establishing safe patterns for tool-enabled AI workflows, permissions, approvals and execution limits.
• Improving automated testing, CI/CD, observability, deployment practices and engineering standards.
• Evaluating infrastructure, third-party providers and technical costs.
• Helping recruit and lead future engineers.
• Working with the founder on product strategy, customer requirements, technical partnerships and commercial priorities.

This role requires both hands-on engineering and strategic thinking. You will help determine not only how we build Synesis, but which technical investments matter most to the business.

Why Join TruTrace Intelligence?

A working product, not just a pitch deck. You will join at a stage where substantial product development has already taken place and the next challenge is to strengthen, validate and scale it.

Meaningful technical ownership. You will have the opportunity to shape core architecture, security standards, AI integration strategy and engineering culture.

A technically interesting problem space. Synesis brings together OSINT, digital intelligence, investigative graph analysis, evidence provenance and controlled AI-assisted workflows.

A long-term market opportunity. We are building for investigative and security needs that are particularly relevant to African institutions, with potential applications across international markets.

Founding-level equity. This is intended to be a genuine co-founder relationship with meaningful equity ownership, aligned with long-term contribution, commitment and agreed vesting terms. It is not a conventional salaried engineering position or a freelance contract.

What Success Looks Like

In the initial phase, success means strengthening the existing platform’s security and architectural foundations, resolving critical reliability issues, preparing the product for controlled customer validation and establishing a sustainable engineering roadmap.

Over time, the ambition is to build a dependable investigative intelligence platform that organisations can trust for complex, source-driven workflows—and to develop a controlled AI integration layer that can support increasingly capable investigative assistance without surrendering analyst oversight.

How to Express Interest

If you are interested in building critical investigative technology with long-term impact, I would like to hear from you.

Please share:

• What you have built and your specific contribution to it.
• Your experience designing, securing or scaling production software.
• Your approach to becoming a technical co-founder in an early-stage company.
• Why the Synesis mission and investigative intelligence space interest you.
• Your availability, preferred level of involvement and expectations for a founding partnership.

I am looking for someone who wants to take genuine ownership, challenge assumptions constructively and help turn a substantial technical foundation into a durable technology business.