The posting
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 bar under commercial time pressure.
What helps you stand out:
- Fintech, payments, or another regulated domain where onboarding is a compliance surface.
- KYB and KYC in production, and replacing a vendor onboarding or verification workflow with an in-house build.
- Jurisdiction-aware or segment-aware policy engines, where requirements are configuration rather than code branches.
- Developer experience work: API documentation, SDKs, sandbox environments, webhook delivery, or developer funnels.
- Activation and lifecycle engineering: in-product onboarding checklists, transactional and lifecycle comms, notification preferences.
- Marketing site or growth-experiment engineering in partnership with Brand Design.
- Growth instrumentation and analytics tooling, and comfort reading a funnel yourself.
- Onboarding for enterprise entities (directors, UBO) or for channel partners and platform-of-platforms models.
What Success Looks Like
- Share of TPV through the API, with a target of 60%. The V3 overhaul, webhook reliability, and API observability are the levers.
- Activated customers, with a target of 200+. Onboarding, digital signatures, and the activation surface are the levers.
- Annualised TPV, contributing to an annualised $250B dollar goal.
- Zero lights-out compliance and financial crime findings on the flows you own.
- Predictable delivery: commitments land on the dates given, and when they slip you flag it early with a revised plan rather than late with an explanation.
- Dependencies land: work with Compliance, Legal, Platform, and Brand Design closes on schedule because you drove it, not because it happened to unblock.
- Discovery converts: ambiguous placeholder initiatives become shaped, sized, RFC-validated work rather than sitting at low confidence for a quarter.
- Quality on the identity and money path: onboarding and API defects are caught by tests and monitoring, not by clients.
- Team strength: fully staffed and ramped, your Tech Lead is growing, strong performers stay, and weak performance is addressed rather than tolerated.
- 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 surfaces that decide whether a client activates and whether their volume comes through our API. Both are company-level KPIs.
- Ownership: The pod, the roadmap, the quality bar, and the GTM interface are all yours to set.
- Scope: Four surfaces, not one: public API, onboarding and verification, activation, and the marketing site. Few EM roles span that much of the customer journey.
- Build, not maintain: Onboarding is coming off vendor tooling, the API is being overhauled, and much of the Q4 roadmap is still undefined. You are shaping it, not inheriting it.
- Learning: Cross-border payments, FX, and settlement, with compliance and correctness constraints that make the problems genuinely hard.
- Access: Direct partnership with the Growth PM, the Head of GTM, Compliance and Legal leadership, and senior engineering leadership.
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.
