Multi Geo / Multi Cloud Application Architect

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** The **Multi Geo / Multi Cloud Application Architect** at OpenFX owns the design and integrity of a payments and FX platform that must operate across multiple geographic regions and cloud environments without compromising on availability, data sovereignty, latency, or regulatory compliance. This is not a role that designs architecture in the abstract. You are responsible for decisions that determine whether a settlement clears in London during an AWS eu-west-1 degradation, whether a client in the UAE can transact without their data leaving the region, and whether OpenFX can migrate between cloud providers without a full platform rewrite. Cross-border payments and FX are inherently distributed problems. Transactions originate in one jurisdiction, clear through correspondent networks in another, and settle in a third. The infrastructure that supports this must match that complexity with equivalent architectural rigour. You are the person who ensures it does. You operate at the intersection of distributed systems engineering, cloud infrastructure, and financial regulatory compliance. You work closely with the Principal Architect, Platform team, pod-level Tech Leads, and the Security and Compliance functions to define standards, validate designs, and resolve the hardest architectural trade-offs the organisation faces. **Key Responsibilities:** - **Multi-Region Architecture Design & Ownership** - Define and maintain the reference architecture for multi-region deployment: traffic routing, data replication, failover behaviour, and regional isolation boundaries - Own architectural decisions that govern how services are deployed, scaled, and failed over across regions; ensure those decisions are documented and revisited as the platform evolves - Design for regional independence: the ability to isolate a region for regulatory or operational reasons without degrading global capability - Define standards for how new services must be designed to operate in a multi-region context from day one, not as a retrofit - **Multi-Cloud Strategy & Portability** - Maintain an architecture that avoids hard coupling to any single cloud provider for critical platform functions - Evaluate where to leverage managed cloud services versus cloud-agnostic alternatives, with explicit reasoning about portability, cost, and operational overhead - Lead design of abstraction layers and platform primitives (with the Platform pod) that allow services to run across cloud environments without service-level re-engineering - Define and test cloud provider failover runbooks; ensure provider-level degradation can be responded to within defined RTO and RPO targets - **Data Sovereignty & Regulatory Architecture** - Design data routing, storage, and processing architectures that enforce jurisdictional data residency requirements across all regions OpenFX operates in - Work with Compliance and Legal to translate regulatory obligations into concrete architectural constraints enforced at infrastructure and application layer - Define the data classification framework for multi-region environments: what replicates globally, what stays regionally isolated, what requires explicit consent to move - Ensure observability infrastructure produces the evidence needed to demonstrate data residency compliance to regulators - **Platform Reliability & Resilience** - Define availability and resilience targets; ensure the architecture is designed to meet them under realistic failure scenarios, not just nominal conditions - Lead chaos engineering and failure mode analysis exercises to validate that failover, replication, and multi-cloud fallback behave as designed - Own the observability architecture across multi-region, multi-cloud deployments: unified logging, distributed tracing, and alerting that works coherently regardless of where workloads run - Establish SLO / SLA frameworks that reflect the availability and latency commitments OpenFX makes to clients and liquidity providers - **Cross-Team Architecture Governance** - Conduct architecture reviews for significant features, integrations, and infrastructure changes across all pods; ensure multi-region and multi-cloud implications are addressed before build begins - Maintain and evolve the ADR library; ensure decisions are current and discoverable by engineers across the organisation - Work with pod Tech Leads to identify and address architectural drift where production systems have deviated from intended design - Contribute to the Platform pod's roadmap: identify shared infrastructure investments that reduce the cost of multi-region operation for all pods **What we are looking for** **Must-haves:** - Deep expertise in multi-region application design: active-active and active-passive topologies, global load balancing, regional failover, and cross-region replication strategies - Strong hands-on experience with at least two major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) and a clear understanding of where provider capabilities diverge in ways that matter for financial workloads - Proficiency in cloud-agnostic infrastructure patterns: Kubernetes (multi-cluster federation, cross-region networking), service mesh architectures, and infrastructure-as-code tooling (Terraform, Pulumi) - Solid understanding of networking fundamentals at scale: BGP, Anycast, CDN strategies, private interconnects, and east-west traffic management across regions - Familiarity with distributed data consistency models: eventual consistency, strong consistency trade-offs, CRDTs, and conflict resolution strategies in globally distributed databases - Understanding of data residency and sovereignty requirements across key OpenFX operating jurisdictions: UAE (ADGM / DFSA), UK (FCA), EU (GDPR / PSD2), and other relevant frameworks - Familiarity with financial infrastructure concepts: payment rail latency, settlement finality, FX liquidity provider connectivity, and correspondent banking dependencies - Ability to produce ADRs, reference architectures, and design documents that are precise enough for engineers to implement from and clear enough for product and compliance to validate against - Strong systems thinking: able to reason about failure modes, blast radius, and cascade effects in complex distributed systems - Communicates complex architectural constraints and trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders **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.