Engineering Manager- Payments

Job 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. Payments owns the money path itself: the corridors we move money through, the regulated obligations that come with holding licenses in the EU, and the product surface — API and GUI — through which institutions initiate, track, and reconcile payments. This is where growth and regulation collide. The business needs new corridors — EUR, MXN, COP, AED, and more — opened fast, each with its own rails, partners, cut-offs, FX mechanics, and settlement quirks. Our EU licenses come with obligations that must be engineered, not just documented: safeguarding of customer funds, transaction monitoring, and evidence that both work continuously. And customers expect a payments product that keeps getting better — more visibility, more control, fewer surprises — across both the API and the dashboard. ### Key Responsibilities This is a new pod. You will stand it up, define its charter, and own three things end to end: **1. Corridor expansion** - Own the playbook for launching new payment corridors — EUR, MXN, COP, AED and beyond — from partner integration through pilot to general availability. - Turn corridor launches from bespoke projects into a repeatable capability: standardized partner integration patterns, corridor configuration over code where possible, and a clear definition of "launch-ready" covering rails, cut-offs, FX, fees, returns, and reconciliation. - Own the reliability of live corridors: settlement timeliness, failure handling, partner degradation and failover behavior, and the runbooks that keep money moving when a partner does not. **2. License operationalization (EU and beyond)** - Translate our EU regulatory obligations into running systems: safeguarding of customer funds (segregation, sweep flows, coverage reconciliation, and the controls around them) and transaction monitoring (rules, alerting, case handoff to compliance). - Build for evidence: every control your systems enforce must produce an audit trail that satisfies regulators, auditors, and partners without a scramble. - Partner with Compliance and Legal to negotiate scope and sequencing — you shape how obligations become engineering requirements rather than absorbing them wholesale. **3. Payments product** - Own the payments product surface across API and GUI: payment initiation, quoting, tracking, statuses and webhooks, returns and recalls, reporting, and the dashboard experience for operations and finance users at our customers. - Ship product features weekly with the discipline the money path demands: idempotency, exactly-once effects on ledgers, backward-compatible API evolution, and rollout strategies with exercised rollbacks. **Across all three:** - Run the Payments 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. - 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, and alerting that catches money-path problems before customers or regulators 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 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 built or operated payment systems in production: payment orchestration, ledgers, settlement, or reconciliation, with a working grasp of failure modes on the money path — duplicates, partial failures, cut-off misses, stuck settlements. - Has integrated banking, payment, or FX partners and lived through the messy reality: sandbox-vs-production drift, certificate and credential churn, partner outages, and degraded-mode operation. - Deep on distributed systems correctness where money is involved: idempotency, exactly-once effects, concurrency, and reconciliation as a first-class design concern. - Has worked directly with compliance, risk, or regulators and can negotiate scope rather than simply absorb requirements. - Has run a high-risk production migration or cutover — a partner switch, a ledger migration, a corridor cutover — with a rollback plan that was genuinely exercised. - Owns on-call and incident command personally, not by delegation. - 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. Standing up a new pod means creating clarity, not waiting for it. **What helps you stand out:** - Cross-border payments: corridor launches, FX, correspondent or local rails, SWIFT/SEPA/local clearing schemes in any of our target markets (EU, LATAM, Middle East, APAC). - Regulated EU/US fintech experience: EMI/PI or MiCAR-style obligations, safeguarding of customer funds, or transaction monitoring systems built to withstand audit. - Multi-partner orchestration: routing across redundant partners, partner health scoring, failover on the money path. - Product sensibility: has shipped customer-facing payments features across both API and UI, and can partner tightly with a PM on sequencing. - Stablecoin or digital-asset settlement rails alongside fiat. ### What Success Looks Like This is a new pod, so KPIs will be locked in with you in your first 60 days. Indicatively: - **Corridor velocity:** Time from "corridor approved" to "first live customer payment" drops measurably with each launch; the second corridor you ship is faster than the first, and the fourth is boring. Indicative target: new corridor live in weeks, not quarters. - **Corridor reliability:** Payment success rate and on-time settlement rate per corridor are measured, published, and improving; no corridor launch causes a customer-visible incident on existing corridors. - **Safeguarding integrity:** Safeguarding reconciliation runs continuously with coverage breaks detected within hours, not at month-end; zero unexplained breaks aged beyond the agreed SLA. - **Monitoring effectiveness:** Transaction monitoring alerts flow to compliance with agreed latency and case-quality standards; no regulatory finding attributable to a missing or broken engineering control. - **Product delivery:** Payments features ship on a weekly cadence with zero-downtime, backward-compatible releases; every risky change has a tested rollback. - **Operational maturity:** Money-path incidents are detected by monitoring before customers report them, and post-incident actions stick. - **Team strength:** Pod 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:** You own the money path itself. Every corridor you open is new revenue; every control you build is what lets the company operate in regulated markets at all. - **Ownership:** Corridors, license operationalization, and the payments product are yours end to end — a rare combination of growth, regulatory, and product scope in one seat. - **Greenfield:** This is a new pod. You define its charter, its standards, and its first hires. - **Learning:** Hard problems at the intersection of correctness, regulation, and scale in cross-border payments. - **Access:** Direct partnership with the payments PM, Compliance leadership, banking partnerships, 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.