SDET (L2) - Banking

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 200 people across San Francisco, New York, Miami, London, Amsterdam, Dubai, Bangalore, Mexico City, 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. Role Overview You will own backend quality engineering for the Banking team, covering the systems that sit at the core of how OpenFX moves and accounts for money: ledgers, payouts, reconciliation, settlement, and the services around them. This is a hands-on SDET role with significant ownership over how we test complex backend systems. You will work directly with backend engineers and product teams to build automation into the development lifecycle, identify failure modes early, and make sure critical money flows remain correct under real-world conditions. You will inherit a growing automation setup, but there is still significant room to shape the architecture, tooling, quality standards, and testing strategy. As transaction volume and system complexity increase, the goal is to move from testing individual flows to building a scalable quality engineering system that gives teams confidence to ship quickly without compromising financial correctness. You will report to the Engineering Manager for Banking and work closely with engineers across the pod. Key Responsibilities • Own backend automation: Design, build, and evolve scalable automation frameworks for APIs, services, databases, and end-to-end banking workflows. • Test financial correctness: Build scenarios covering transaction processing, ledger consistency, reconciliation, settlement, payouts, and financial calculations. • Test failure behaviour: Validate retries, idempotency, concurrency, duplicate requests, timeouts, partial failures, and recovery paths across distributed systems. • Build quality into CI/CD: Integrate automated tests into deployment pipelines, improve execution speed through parallelization, and create reliable quality gates. • Own test infrastructure: Build and maintain test environments, data setup, mocks, simulators, and containerized test runners using tools such as Docker and Kubernetes. • Drive performance testing: Build load, stress, and resilience test suites using tools such as JMeter or k6 for high-volume financial workloads. • Improve debugging and observability: Use logs, metrics, traces, and automation to make failures easier to diagnose and reduce time spent on root cause analysis. • Partner early in development: Work with engineers during design and architecture discussions to identify risk areas, edge cases, and testability gaps before implementation. • Use AI to improve engineering velocity: Apply AI tools for test generation, synthetic data creation, debugging, and automated root cause analysis where they materially improve productivity. • Raise the engineering bar: Review automation code, improve testing standards, and mentor junior SDETs on framework design, coding practices, and system-level testing. What We're Looking For Must-haves • You have built or significantly extended backend automation frameworks rather than only contributing individual test cases. • You are strong at testing REST APIs, backend services, databases, and service-to-service integrations. • You can reason about distributed-system failure modes including retries, idempotency, concurrency, timeouts, duplicate processing, and partial failures. • You can validate complex workflows across APIs, relational databases, events, queues, and downstream services. • You are comfortable writing complex SQL queries to validate data integrity and system behaviour. • You understand how to integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines and design test suites that are fast, stable, and actionable. • You have strong fundamentals in debugging, clean code, Git, and data structures and algorithms. • You can independently understand a complex system, identify the highest-risk areas, and translate them into an effective test strategy. • You can work closely with backend engineers and challenge designs constructively when you see reliability, correctness, or testability risks. What helps you stand out • Experience testing payments, banking, fintech, or other correctness-critical systems. • You can write production-quality automation code in Java, TypeScript, JavaScript, or Python, with strong software engineering fundamentals. • Experience validating ledgers, reconciliation, settlement, payouts, or transaction accounting. • Understanding of double-entry accounting or financial ledger principles. • Experience with Java/RestAssured, TypeScript/JavaScript automation frameworks, Maven, or TestNG. • Experience testing API authentication and security mechanisms such as OAuth or HMAC signing. • Experience with event-driven architectures, message queues, and asynchronous workflows. • Hands-on experience with AWS, particularly services such as S3, CloudWatch, or EKS. • Experience running test infrastructure on Docker or Kubernetes. • Experience with performance and load-testing tools such as JMeter or k6. • Experience building mocks, simulators, service virtualization, or sophisticated test-data tooling. • Strong observability experience across logs, metrics, traces, and production monitoring. • You use AI tools such as Copilot or LLMs thoughtfully to improve engineering velocity, debugging, and automation quality. 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.