Senior Backend Engineer (L3) - Trading

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 We're hiring a Senior Backend Engineer for our Trading team — the team that owns the client's entire trade experience. Trading owns quote generation, pricing strategy, the spread engine, and the trade lifecycle across GUI, API, and soon conversational AI. Our north star is Total Payment Volume, with Gross Revenue as the control metric. Every trade a client places moves through the systems this team builds. You will own significant parts of the Client Trading Engine and Pricing Engine end-to-end — design, build, ship, and operate. This is a hands-on senior IC role with high ownership and accountability - the pricing logic you write today shows up in tomorrow's revenue numbers. We're specifically looking for someone with a trading background — you've built systems where a quote had to be correct and fast, and where a bug meant real money. Think a crypto exchange, brokerage, or trading platform (CoinDCX, Groww, CoinSwitch Kuber, or similar). ## Key Responsibilities - Design, build, and operate services across the trade path — quoting, pricing, spread application, and trade lifecycle management. - Own features end-to-end: scoping, technical design, delivery, rollout, and the operational health of what you ship. - Drive work to closure with Product, Design, and Operations. You are accountable for adoption, not just delivery. - Act as a product engineer — scope a problem statement, understand its product impact, and take the hard prioritisation calls. - Build for correctness and latency on a live client trade path. Understand and weigh trade offs. - Instrument what you build — logging, metrics, and alerting that make the behaviour of the trade path predictable in production. - Design for failure: retries, idempotency, and safe recovery when a downstream dependency misbehaves. - Expose trading capability across surfaces — GUI, public API, and conversational AI — with clean, stable contracts. - Raise the bar through code review and design feedback, and mentor L1/L2 engineers on the team. - Build a healthy engineering-excellence and tech-debt backlog — surface the right items, work with the EM on a resolution plan, and drive them to closure. - Participate in on-call, respond to incidents with urgency, and turn post-mortems into durable fixes. - Work directly with product and the Hedging team to connect what you build to Total Payment Volume and gross revenue. ## What we are looking for **Must-haves:** - 4–6 years of experience building and operating production backend systems. - **A trading background** — you've worked at a trading company, exchange, or brokerage and have built systems on a live trade or order path (e.g. CoinDCX, Groww, CoinSwitch Kuber, or similar). - Strong fundamentals in system design, data modelling, and API design, with practical experience in distributed systems. - Solid command of object-oriented programming principles and low-level design patterns. - Solid production engineering instincts — observability, debugging complex systems, performance tuning, and incident response. - Comfort with **abstract, ambiguous problems** — you can turn a vague mandate into scoped, sequenced deliverables without waiting for someone to specify it for you. - **Hands-on and high agency.** You find the important problem and go solve it rather than waiting to be assigned it. - **Heavy AI user.** You use AI coding tools with real technique and get materially more done because of it. - **Data-driven**, and a clear written communicator — we are async-heavy and globally distributed. **What helps you stand out:** - Experience with pricing, quoting, or spread engines specifically. - Experience with FX, multi-currency systems, or cross-border payments. - Experience with market data, order books, or market microstructure. ## What Success Looks Like - The services you own on the trade path are reliable, well-tested, and observable — issues are caught before clients notice them. - You ship complex features end-to-end from technical design to execution, delivery and adoption. - The team moves faster because of your code reviews, documentation, and technical judgment. - L1/L2 engineers around you grow measurably faster. - You become a go-to engineer for the trade path. - You raise the bar for the Trading team. ## 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.