Head of People & Talent

About Us OpenFX is on a mission to move money as freely as data, unrestricted by time zones, banking hours, or legacy systems. We build the infrastructure that powers cross-border payments for institutions: programmatic FX, settlement, collections, and payouts through a single API. Less than 2.5 years after founding, we process $80B in annualized transaction volume. We are roughly 180 people across San Francisco, New York, Miami, London, Amsterdam, Dubai, Bangalore, and Singapore, with regulated entities and license applications spanning the US, UK, EU, UAE, and beyond. The team comes from J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase, Stripe, Rippling, PayPal, Affirm, and Kraken. We are backed by Accel, Atomico, Lightspeed, M13, NFX, and Northzone, amongst several other global tier-one investors. The Role You will build and lead the entire people function: talent acquisition and people operations, across every geography, from the infrastructure up. This is the senior-most people seat in the company. You report to the COO and work directly with the CEO on org design, executive hiring, workforce planning, and compensation philosophy. This is a builder role. There is a foundation, not a finished function. You will decide what the people function looks like at 300 and design the path to 1000, then build the team that runs it. What you inherit • A People Ops and Talent team of 7 • Greenhouse as the ATS, with structured interviewing process • A Rippling deployment in flight as the core HR system • A written culture document that the company actually uses in hiring and performance decisions • A company-wide onboarding baseline being stood up now • Roughly 50 hires planned across the company in the next two quarters What you will own • The hiring engine. Recruiting infrastructure, structured interviews and scorecards, internal sourcing to cut agency dependence, and the operating cadence that fills priority roles without dropping the bar. Every hire must raise the standard of their function. You enforce that, including against urgency. • Global people operations. Onboarding, offboarding, benefits, and employment compliance across the US, EU, UK, IN, SG and UAE. Every policy and system you build has to work in all six from day one. There is no domestic-first version of this job. • Performance system. You design and run it end to end: behavioral scorecards for skills, delivery, and culture; a talent bar that rises with seniority; semiannual calibrated reviews the CEO approves; promotion on sustained performance, never tenure; and a defined underperformance path of severance or a six-week improvement plan. Functional leaders define skills for their domains. You make the grades consistent, fast, and fair. • Workforce planning and org design. You partner with the CEO and functional leaders on the workforce plan, spans of control, and leveling. You bring a point of view on what the org should look like at 300 and 500 and 1000, not just a headcount spreadsheet. • Compensation and equity. Comp philosophy across all hubs with very different labor markets, plus equity band design and refresh strategy for a company between funding rounds. • Your own team. You hire recruiters and people partners, delegate deliberately, and raise the people-leadership capability of every manager in the company. The hard problems These are the reasons this role is interesting. If they read as tedious rather than compelling, this is the wrong job for you. • Regulated hiring. We have US state money transmitter licenses, an OCC bank charter application under progress, and licenses in the UK, EU, CAN, IN, UAE, and Australia. That means fit-and-proper hiring for control functions, background and regulatory screening built into the funnel, and the reality that a slow Compliance or MLRO hire directly delays a license. • Speed without dilution. Doubling headcount is easy. Doubling headcount while every hire raises the bar, across six hubs, is not an easy feat. • A performance system that works at 180 and at 500. Scorecards, talent bars, and calibration have to be rigorous enough to mean something and light enough that managers running at full speed actually use them. Off-the-shelf systems fail one test or the other. You will build one that passes both, and defend the bar without forced quotas or theater. • Six labor markets, one company. US, UK, EU, IN, UAE and SG have different comp norms, benefits expectations, employment law, and cultural defaults. You have to build one coherent system that works in all of them without averaging into mediocrity anywhere. • Equity between rounds. Designing bands, grants, and refreshes at a company heading into a priced round, where the framing you choose affects both closing candidates and the cap table. • Performance in an ownership culture. We run on autonomy, direct feedback, and outcome-based evaluation. Most off-the-shelf performance systems fight that. Yours cannot. Must-haves • You have built people infrastructure through the transition from roughly 50 to more than 200 people across multiple countries, and you have seen what comes after: you know which decisions made at 200 break at 500, because you scaled there yourself. • You have designed and run a performance and compensation system, not just administered one someone else built. You can show us the framework, explain the choices behind it, and tell us honestly what you would change. • You are credible in both talent acquisition and people operations, and can operate hands-on in both until your team exists. • You operate with high autonomy. We give you a charter, a budget, and access to every leader. We do not give you a playbook. • You write well. We are distributed across time zones and decisions travel through documents. Fintech or regulated-industry experience helps but is not required. We care about what you built. What this role actually demands • The scope is wide and stays wide until you build your team. For the first stretch, you are the recruiter, the people partner, and the strategist. • This is not a remote role. You will be based in one of our key hubs: New York, Miami, London, Dubai, or Bangalore. • The company spans 12 hours of time zones. You will take early and late calls and travel when it matters. In exchange, you get real authority over a global function, not a regional slice of one. • Feedback is direct in both directions, including with the CEO. If you have only worked places where candor flows downward, this will be an adjustment. • The performance system you build applies to you first. This role is evaluated on outcomes like every other, and your own scorecard will be one of the first ones written. If that list energizes you more than it worries you, you will thrive here. 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.