L3 Tech Lead

OpenFX processes billions of dollars in transaction volume every month across global corridors. Our backend systems power pricing, routing, settlement, reconciliation, compliance, and risk. These systems sit directly on the money path, where correctness, reliability, and latency are non negotiable.

As the company scales from billions to tens of billions in monthly volume, complexity increases faster than headcount. Without strong technical leadership, we risk fragmented systems, hidden operational risk, slow execution, and repeated production failures.

We need a Tech Lead who can own large system boundaries, set engineering standards, and raise the quality bar across teams while still being deeply hands on.

If we do not get this right, we will scale complexity faster than capability.

In your first 6 to 12 months, you will:

1. Own end to end architecture for critical money movement systems such as transaction orchestration, ledgers, reconciliation, pricing pipelines, or partner integrations.
2. Set technical direction and standards for backend systems, including correctness guarantees, failure handling, observability, and API design.
3. Lead system design for new initiatives by decomposing ambiguous business problems into scalable, reliable architectures.
4. Reduce systemic operational risk by identifying cross service failure modes, data inconsistencies, and scalability bottlenecks.
5. Be the final technical reviewer for designs and critical changes that affect correctness, money movement, or platform stability.
6. Mentor and level up engineers by reviewing designs, code, and incident responses, and by modelling strong ownership.
7. Partner closely with Product, Ops, Risk, and Infra leadership to align technical decisions with business priorities.
8. Move core system metrics such as transaction success rate, latency, incident frequency, and reconciliation accuracy across multiple services.

You will be measured on:

• System quality at scale: Core systems are correct, resilient, and observable even under failure and peak load
• Technical leadership: Engineers make better decisions because of the standards, guidance, and reviews you provide
• Operational excellence: Incidents are fewer, smaller in blast radius, and faster to resolve
• Execution leverage: Teams ship faster with less rework due to clear architecture and decision making
• Trust: Product, Ops, and Engineering leaders rely on your judgment for high stakes decisions

Required (Non negotiable):

• 8 to 10+ years building backend systems in production environments
• Proven ownership of large, business critical backend systems
• Strong fundamentals in system design, data modeling, and backend engineering
• Deep experience with failures, retries, concurrency, and distributed systems
• Track record of making and defending hard technical tradeoffs
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction
• Ability to clearly communicate complex technical decisions to non technical stakeholders

Preferred (Accelerates ramp, not required):

• Experience in fintech, payments, or high transaction volume systems
• Experience designing ledgers or financial correctness systems
• Hands on experience with PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, or similar technologies
• Strong observability and incident management experience
• Prior experience as a Tech Lead or Senior Engineer

Impact: Decisions you make affect real money, risk exposure, and company level outcomes.

Leverage: Your work multiplies through teams and systems, not just individual contributions.

Ownership: You own technical outcomes, not just delivery.

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

Access: You work directly with senior engineering leadership, product leadership, and founders.