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
We're hiring a Tech Lead for our Hedging team — the team that owns the risk OpenFX carries.
Hedging owns inventory and exposure management, risk management, hedging positions across venues through smart routing strategies, market making, Cost, PnL and net revenue calculation. Every trade a client places creates exposure, and this team decides what we hold, what we hedge, where we hedge it, and what it costs us.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role, not a management role. You will not own headcount, performance reviews, or hiring decisions. What you own is the technical direction, quality bar, and execution coherence of the Hedging team's work — the Risk Management Engine, Smart Hedging, and the position and PnL layer underneath them. You and the Engineering Manager operate as a closely coordinated pair: the EM owns the people, the process, and the delivery plan; you own how the work is designed, how quality is held, and how technical decisions get made day to day.
You should expect to write code. The strongest Team Leads here lead through design, review and judgment, but their credibility comes from building.
We're specifically looking for someone with a trading background — you've led or built systems where a position had to be accurate and a hedge had to fire in time, and where a bug meant real money. Think a crypto exchange, brokerage, or trading platform (CoinDCX, Groww, CoinSwitch Kuber, or similar).
Key Responsibilities
- Own the technical direction of the Hedging team's work — exposure and position keeping, hedge decisioning, venue routing, market making, and Cost / PnL / net revenue calculation.
- Lead design discussions and drive technical decisions to resolution, breaking large, ambiguous efforts into workstreams the team can execute.
- Act as the senior engineer in the team — mentor and guide engineers across every level through design collaboration, pairing and feedback, and be the person the team brings its hardest problems to.
- Review the team's work to a high standard: not just whether it is correct, but whether it is technically coherent with where the pod is headed.
- Own the quality bar for what the team ships — tested, observable, reconcilable and operationally safe before it is called done.
- Keep engineering excellence and tech debt visible and shrinking, with a resolution plan agreed with the EM.
- Take end-to-end accountability for the technical execution of the roadmap, surfacing risks and options to the EM early.
- Drive work to closure with Product, Operations, treasury and finance — scope the problem, understand its impact on exposure, risk and net revenue, and be accountable for adoption, not just delivery.
- Own the risk path in production: lead incident response and turn post-mortems into durable systemic fixes.
What we are looking for
Must-haves:
- 6–8 years of experience building and operating production backend systems, including time spent as the technical lead of a team or workstream.
- A trading background — you've worked at a trading company, exchange, or brokerage and have built systems on a live trade, order or risk path (e.g. CoinDCX, Groww, CoinSwitch Kuber, or similar).
- Technical depth with the ability to lead, review and guide work across the full scope of the owned systems.
- Strong system design skills — you decompose complex problems into implementable, well-structured pieces with clear contracts.
- Solid command of object-oriented programming principles and low-level design patterns.
- Strong production engineering instincts — observability, debugging complex systems, performance tuning, and incident response on systems that run 24/7.
- Ability to drive technical decisions to resolution without formal authority, and to lead through influence rather than escalation.
- Comfort with abstract, ambiguous problems — you can turn a vague mandate into scoped, sequenced deliverables without waiting for someone to specify it for you.
- Hands-on and high agency. You still write code, and you find the important problem and go solve it rather than waiting to be assigned it.
- Heavy AI user. You use AI coding tools with real technique and get materially more done because of it.
- Data-driven, and a clear written communicator — we are async-heavy and globally distributed, so RFCs, design docs and written updates carry real weight.
What helps you stand out:
- Experience with hedging, exposure or risk management systems specifically.
- Experience with multi-venue execution, smart order routing, or market making.
- Experience with PnL, cost-basis or position-keeping logic, and reconciliation against external venues.
- Experience with FX, multi-currency systems, or cross-border payments.
- Experience pairing with an EM on delivery, and mentoring engineers to the next level.
What Success Looks Like
- The Hedging team's technical output is consistently high quality — well-designed, well-tested, observable, and operationally sound. Exposure is accurate and hedges fire as intended.
- You and your EM operate as an effective pair: delivery is predictable, risks surface early, and the team is clear on what to build and how.
- Engineers on the team grow measurably in technical depth and confidence under your leadership.
- Tech debt on the risk path is visible, prioritised, and actively shrinking.
- Work lands and gets adopted, not just shipped.
- You are the trusted technical voice for Hedging and a reliable partner to Product, Operations and finance.
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.
