L2 backend Engineer

OpenFX processes billions of dollars in transaction volume every month across global corridors. Our backend systems power pricing, routing, settlement, reconciliation, compliance, and risk. Every bug, retry, or inconsistency has real financial consequences.

Today, many systems are strained by scale, complexity, and speed of change. We need backend engineers who can build reliable, observable, and correct systems that scale from billions to tens of billions in monthly volume without proportional increases in risk or headcount.

If we do not solve this well, we will either move too slowly or incur expensive production failures.

In your first 6 to 12 months, you will:

1. Own 1 to 2 critical backend systems or services that sit on the money path such as pricing engines, transaction orchestration, ledgers, reconciliation pipelines, or partner integrations.
2. Design APIs and data models that remain correct under retries, partial failures, concurrency, and real world edge cases.
3. Make systems production grade by implementing monitoring, alerting, idempotency, rate limiting, and clear failure handling.
4. Reduce operational risk and latency by identifying bottlenecks, race conditions, and failure modes in existing systems.
5. Work closely with Product, Ops, Risk, and Infra to translate ambiguous business requirements into robust technical solutions.
6. Improve at least 2 to 3 core system metrics such as transaction success rate, latency, reconciliation accuracy, or incident frequency.

You will be measured on:

• System correctness and reliability: Services operate with minimal incidents and clear recovery paths when failures occur
• Production ownership: Issues are detected early via metrics and alerts, not customer complaints
• Business impact: Backend improvements lead to measurable gains in success rates, cost reduction, or operational efficiency
• Decision quality: Tradeoffs are deliberate, documented, and defensible
• System adoption: Internal teams trust and rely on the systems you own

Required (Non-negotiable):

• 3 to 8 years building backend systems in production environments
• Strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and backend engineering
• Experience designing APIs and working with relational databases
• Hands-on experience handling failures, retries, and concurrency
• Proven ownership of systems beyond initial development
• Ability to explain technical decisions clearly to non-backend stakeholders

Preferred (Accelerates ramp, not required):

• Experience in fintech, payments, or high transaction volume systems
• Exposure to distributed systems and event driven architectures
• Experience with PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, or similar technologies
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure and observability tooling
• Experience mentoring other engineers

Impact: Systems you build will move real money and directly affect revenue, cost, and risk.

Ownership: You own services end to end, from design to production reliability.

Learning: You will work on hard problems involving correctness, scale, and failure handling.

Scope: You will help define backend engineering standards as the company scales.

Access: You will work closely with senior engineering leaders, product, and operations.