Engineering Manager- Payments

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 regulate