Engineering Manager- Payments

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. 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…