Chief Technology Officer

CTO (co-founding role) at NamselaKathmandu · Full-timeHi, I’m Prabhat, founder of Namsela.A few years ago, I watched friends who run lodges and trekking agencies lose almost everything when COVID hit. In 2021, arrivals to Nepal fell by nearly 90%. Most of those businesses had no savings, no bank loans and nothing to fall back on. Last September, during the unrest, I saw it start again: 4 in 10 trekkers booked for Pokhara cancelled.Nepal already has the people who keep travellers safe. What’s missing is a trusted link between them and the traveller. That’s what Namsela is building.Our first product is built and close to launch. What comes after it, and why it matters, I’d rather tell you in person.I’m looking for someone to own the technology with me.In practice that means: You’d take over the platform: TypeScript, Node.js, Next.js, MongoDB. You’d lead our small engineering team, decide how we build, test and ship, and tell me when something I want isn’t ready. Much of what we build has to work on a phone at 4,000 meters with no signal, so you’ll think about offline use and reliability more than most engineers do. And because we hold travelers’ data, privacy isn’t an afterthought here.The AI side, honestly.We’re not building a chatbot. Our AI work is about prediction: helping travelers make better decisions about their trips and making our product more accurate over time. In travel, a wrong prediction costs trust, so we hold ourselves to a high bar. You’d own:Building reliable data pipelines from messy, real-world sourcesTraining and testing prediction models, and proving they beat simple rules before anything reaches a userDeciding where AI belongs and where it doesn’t. Some parts of a product should never depend on a model.For this you’ll need:Solid machine learning on tabular and time-series data (gradient boosting and similar methods)A real understanding of evaluation: time-aware testing, calibrated probabilities, false alarms versus missesComfort with gaps, noise and sparse recordsPython for modelling, and the judgement to get results into a TypeScript product cleanlyBonus: geospatial data, weather or climate data, or risk and safety systemsYou’re probably right for this if:You’ve built and run real production systems, and you’ve led or mentored other engineersYou’ve taken at least one machine learning model from a notebook into something real people usedYou’d rather ship something small that works than promise something big that doesn’tYou care about Nepal, and the idea of protecting guides’ and lodge owners’ livelihoods means something to youIt’s a plus if you’ve worked on mobile or offline-first apps, or anything where people depended on your system in an emergency.What I can offer: a real co-founding stake, a salary TBD, and a say in every important decision from day one. I won’t pretend it’s a big-company job. It’s an early-stage company with a clear plan, a working product, and a problem worth solving.If this sounds like you, apply here or write to me at office@namsela.com. Skip the cover letter. Send me your CV and a few lines about something you built that you’re proud of, and why. If it’s a model that worked in the real world, even better. Prabhat Timilsina