Description
About Us
OpenFX is on a mission to move money as freely as data, unrestricted by time zones, banking hours, or legacy systems. We are building the infrastructure that will power the next generation of cross-border payment systems for institutions. The team's execution has been exceptional, and we're scaling at a remarkable pace. Our stellar early team comes with experience in companies like J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, FalconX, PayPal, Affirm, Polygon, Kraken, Nium & others. We're backed by Accel, Lightspeed, NfX and other top-tier investors.
Role Overview
OpenFX processes billions of dollars in transaction volume every month across global corridors. Application Platform owns the layer every other team builds on: the API gateway, authentication and session security, the admin surface, API standards and governance, identifiers, and the observability that makes production legible.
This is where the company's constraints collide. Security requires strong customer authentication, mTLS, and session controls. Product teams need to ship weekly. Auditors and cyber insurers need access controls and evidence. Engineering needs deployment hygiene that does not silently drift. Today these get resolved case by case, in meetings, at the cost of speed.
If we do not solve this well, every product team pays a tax in ambiguity, and one bad gateway or auth change becomes an outage on the money path.
Key Responsibilities
- Run the Application Platform pod of roughly 8 to 15 engineers and QA, with a Tech Lead reporting to you. You own the roadmap, the standards, and the on-call posture.
- Own the API gateway and edge: routing, plugins, rate limiting, mTLS and HMAC, and rollout strategy for changes sitting in front of production traffic with a rollback path that has actually been exercised.
- Own authentication and session security: strong customer authentication, re-authentication, new-device gating, session revocation, API key and credential management.
- Own API standards and governance: the standards document, the enforcement point, versioning conventions, identifier schemes, and a review process that stays real rather than aspirational.
- Make security review predictable: agree the interface with InfoSec so RFCs get scoped sign-off with named owners and dates, instead of open-ended review that stalls rollouts.
- Stay hands-on. You review designs, and you still write and ship code, debug production, and set the implementation bar by example, including the standard for AI-assisted development.
- Raise operational maturity: incident command and reporting, deployment and branch hygiene, delivery metrics that measure production reality, audit logging, and alerting that catches problems before customers do.
- Hire and grow the team: close open roles, grow your Tech Lead, run 30-60-90 ramps, keep on-call sustainable, and act on performance early.
What We Are Looking For
Must-haves:
- EM-level scope: 2 or more years managing a full team of 5 or more, with a Tech Lead or senior IC reporting in, on top of a strong backend or infrastructure IC track record.
- Still writes code. You can design an API, model a schema, and produce idiomatic, runnable, tested code. Design fluency without hands-on ability is not enough at this level.
- Has owned a shared platform, gateway, or authentication system with internal teams as customers.
- Deep on API design, authentication, and distributed systems failure modes: blast radius, concurrency, idempotency.
- Has run a high-risk production migration or cutover with a rollback plan that was genuinely exercised.
- Owns on-call and incident command personally, not by delegation.
- Has worked directly with security or compliance and can negotiate scope rather than simply absorb requirements.
- Demonstrated hiring and performance management, including at least one underperformance case you saw through.
- High agency: operates with low oversight on ambiguous problems, in a demanding environment.
What helps you stand out:
- Fintech, payments, or another regulated environment with audit and access-control obligations.
- API gateway in production: custom plugins, mTLS, OAuth2, control plane topology decisions.
- Strong customer authentication, PSD2-style requirements, or step-up authentication.
- API governance at scale: standards enforcement, versioning, identifier design, deprecation.
- Observability and audit logging platforms, and DORA or similar delivery metrics.
- Improving deployment and branch discipline across teams you do not manage.
What Success Looks Like
- Platform reliability: Gateway, auth, and admin changes ship without customer-visible incidents, and every risky change has a tested rollback.
- Internal adoption: Product teams follow platform standards because they are clear and useful, and platform is not routed around.
- Security throughput: Security-dependent work lands on schedule; review is scoped and time-bound rather than open-ended.
- Operational maturity: Incidents are detected by monitoring, reported consistently, and produce changes that stick.
- Team strength: Fully staffed and ramped, your Tech Lead is growing, on-call is sustainable, weak performance is addressed.
- Talent magnetism: You bring strong engineers with you and raise the bar of every loop you sit on.
Why This Role
- Impact: The systems you own sit in front of every transaction. Getting them right is the difference between shipping weekly and shipping carefully once a quarter.
- Ownership: Gateway, authentication, standards, and operational maturity are yours to set for the whole engineering organisation.
- Scope: You define how platform and product teams work together, and how security review fits into delivery.
- Learning: Hard problems at the intersection of correctness, security, and scale in cross-border payments.
- Access: Direct partnership with the platform PM, InfoSec leadership, and senior engineering leadership.
What We Offer
- Competitive salary and benefits package.
- Equity in a rapidly growing company.
- Opportunity to work in a fast-paced startup at the forefront of fintech innovation.
- Opportunity to make a significant impact on global financial infrastructure.
- Collaborative work culture with emphasis on personal and professional growth.
We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive workplace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.
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