Senior Backend Engineer (L5) -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 We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer for our Payments team. This is the senior-most individual contributor role on the systems that move money across borders — payment orchestration, corridor and partner integrations, FX and quoting, the payment lifecycle from initiation to settlement confirmation, and the regulated controls (safeguarding, transaction monitoring) that our EU licenses demand. It is a hands-on technical leadership role on the money path, where a new corridor is only as good as its failure handling, and a regulatory control is only as good as the evidence it produces. The cost of a defect is measured in real money, stuck customer payments, or a finding from a regulator. You will report to an Engineering Manager and work closely with engineers, product, compliance, and partnerships across the company. You will set the technical direction for payments, lead the hardest corridor and orchestration problems, and raise the bar for how we build. This role requires someone who has built and operated payment or other correctness-critical systems in production, ideally against external partners whose behavior you do not control. If your experience is limited to systems where occasional data inconsistency is acceptable, where every dependency was internal and well-behaved, or where you have not owned something end to end for a meaningful stretch, this will be a stretch. ### Key Responsibilities - Own the technical direction for payments: payment orchestration, corridor and partner integrations, FX and quoting, lifecycle modelling (statuses, webhooks, returns, recalls), and settlement confirmation. - Design the corridor expansion architecture: turn new-corridor launches (EUR, MXN, COP, AED, and beyond) from bespoke integration projects into configuration-driven, repeatable capability — standardized partner adapters, corridor config over code, and a rigorous definition of launch-ready. - Lead the engineering of regulated controls: safeguarding flows (segregation, sweeps, coverage reconciliation) and transaction monitoring pipelines, built so that every control produces an audit trail that stands up to regulators and auditors. - Define and maintain the standards for money-path code — idempotency, exactly-once effects, consistency guarantees under partner failure, safe retries against external systems, and backward-compatible API evolution. - Own resilience against partners: degraded-mode behavior, failover and routing across redundant partners, cut-off handling, and reconciliation as a first-class design concern rather than an afterthought. - Own the reliability and observability bar for payment flows, and lead incident response when money is stuck or a partner is down. - Lead architecture reviews for new corridors, partner integrations, and high-risk changes where correctness and auditability matter most. - Mentor senior engineers and help set what great looks like when hiring. - Partner across product, compliance, risk, and banking partnerships, translating technical trade-offs for non-engineering audiences — including why a corridor cannot launch until its returns path is real. ### What We Are Looking For **Must-haves:** - Significant experience as a senior or staff-level backend engineer, with a track record of owning complex systems in production. - Has built or operated payment systems in production — orchestration, partner integrations, or payment lifecycle systems — with a working grasp of money-path failure modes: duplicates, partial failures, cut-off misses, stuck or lost payments. - Has integrated external banking, payment, or FX partners and lived through the messy reality: sandbox-vs-production drift, certificate and credential churn, undocumented behavior, partner outages. - Sound judgment on correctness under failure — retries against external systems, idempotency, exactly-once effects, and safe handling of critical data. - Deep expertise in distributed systems and a strong grasp of reliability, performance, and scalability trade-offs. - Excellent technical communication and the ability to lead initiatives across teams without formal authority. - Fluency in a modern TypeScript / Node backend stack and cloud infrastructure. **What helps you stand out:** - Cross-border payments experience: corridor launches, FX, SWIFT/SEPA or local clearing schemes in any of our target markets (EU, LATAM, Middle East, APAC). - Experience building safeguarding, transaction monitoring, sanctions screening, or other regulated controls in an EMI/PI, PSD2, or MiCAR-style environment. - Multi-partner orchestration: routing, partner health scoring, and failover on live money flows. - Experience with durable workflow or orchestration engines for long-running, multi-step payment processes. - Stablecoin or digital-asset settlement rails alongside fiat. - A strong observability practice on financial or other high-stakes flows. ### What Success Looks Like - New corridors launch on a repeatable, configuration-driven foundation — each launch is faster and safer than the last, and none destabilizes existing corridors. - Safeguarding and transaction monitoring run as continuously verified systems with audit trails that survive scrutiny, not as periodic manual exercises. - The payment lifecycle is correct, observable, and resilient under partner failure — stuck payments are detected and recovered by the system, not discovered by customers. - Architectural decisions hold up without fundamental rework within 12 to 18 months, even as corridors and partners multiply. - Engineers across the team ship faster because of the shared orchestration foundations, standards, and tooling you've built. - You've raised the technical ceiling of payments engineering at OpenFX, not just delivered individual projects. ### 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.