Engineering Manager- Growth

About this role

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. The Growth pod owns everything a client touches before and while they become a paying, trading customer: the public API they integrate against, the onboarding and verification journey that gets them approved, the activation surface that gets them to their first trade, and the marketing site that brings them in.

Client onboarding runs today on third-party tooling and is being brought in-house, which means rebuilding KYB and KYC as our own product rather than a vendor workflow. And onboarding policy is still effectively global, when the business needs requirements that vary by jurisdiction and customer segment.

Every point of friction across those surfaces is a client who does not activate, or who activates slowly and expensively. The work is also unusually dependency-heavy: nearly every onboarding item depends on Compliance and Legal, the API programme depends on Platform, Payments, Banking, and Client Trading, and the website work depends on Brand Design.

We need an Engineering Manager who can hold four surfaces at once, ship inside a stage-gated product process without letting it become theatre, and keep a correctness bar on flows that touch identity, compliance, and the money path.

If we do not solve this well, activation stays gated on manual work and vendor tooling, and growth stays bottlenecked on ad hoc engineering requests.

Key Responsibilities

• Run the Growth pod of roughly 6 to 10 engineers and QA across frontend, backend, and integrations. You own the roadmap, the delivery, and the standards.

• Own the API as a product. Land the V3 overhaul, our largest and most cross-dependent programme, while V2 stays supported. Ship client-facing API.

• Bring onboarding in-house. Move the client onboarding experience off third-party tools onto OpenFX, and build the rules engine that replaces global policy with dynamic KYB and KYC requirements by jurisdiction and customer segment.

• Extend onboarding to new segments — self-serve signup through to first trade with no sales touch, enterprise (large entities, directors, UBO, bespoke verification), channel partners and platform-of-platforms, multi-product onboarding across banking and payments, and eventually agent-based customers.

• Own the activation surface: digital signatures, in-product activation checklists, recovery and lifecycle client comms, and a self-serve notification centre.

• Own the marketing site as a growth surface, partnering with Brand Design and the visual explainers that both generate market intelligence and give sales what they need to close.

• Run the product development process credibly. Take work from discovery through solution, design, and RFC validation into delivery and beta, own or assign RFCs, and hold the design-ready and delivery-ready gates so nothing enters a sprint half-shaped.

• Manage a dependency-saturated roadmap. Compliance, Legal, Platform, Payments, Banking, Currencies, TPV, Client Trading, Brand Design, and GTM all sit on your critical path. Sequencing around them is a core part of the job, not an interruption to it.

• Own the interface with GTM and Product: one intake for growth and sales requests, joint prioritisation with the Growth PM, and an expedite lane whose cost in displaced work is explicit rather than silently absorbed.

• 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.

• Hold the bar where correctness is not optional: identity and KYC deduplication, idempotency on quote and trade paths, permission and compliance boundaries, money precision and rounding.

• Hire and grow the team: close open roles, grow your team, run 30-60-90 ramps, set explicit performance expectations, and act on them 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 individual contributor 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.

• Experience owning a public or partner-facing API as a product, including versioning and running an old and a new major version side by side.

• Shipped client-facing product end to end, including the unglamorous parts: migrations, deprecations, and error states.

• Has delivered against Compliance and Legal as hard dependencies, not as a review step at the end. Onboarding at OpenFX is a compliance surface first and a product surface second.

• Comfortable running a stage-gated product process — discovery, solution and design validation, RFC, delivery — without letting it slow the team down or become box-ticking.

• Can take a one-line placeholder and turn it into shaped, sized, sequenced work. A large share of the forward roadmap is deliberately undefined.

• Demonstrated hiring and performance management, including at least one underperformance case you saw through to an outcome.

• Has worked directly with Product and a commercial or GTM function, and can say no with a reason that holds.

• High agency: operates with low oversight on ambiguous problems, in a demanding environment.

• Can articulate and enforce a correctness…