Senior Backend Engineer (L5) - Core trading

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 Staff Engineer to own the architecture of OpenFX's trading and hedging core — the systems that price a client's trade, execute it, and manage the risk we take on as a result. Two teams sit inside this scope: • Trading owns the client's entire trade experience — quote generation, pricing strategy, the spread engine, and the trade lifecycle across GUI, API, and soon conversational AI. Its north star is Total Payment Volume, with Gross Revenue as the control metric. • Hedging owns inventory and exposure management, risk management, hedging across venues through smart routing, market making, and WAC / PnL / net revenue calculation. You will be the senior-most individual contributor across both, responsible for the Client Trading Engine, Pricing Engine, Risk Management Engine, and Smart Hedging. This is a hands-on role. You will write code, set architectural direction, and be the person the organisation trusts to get the trade and risk path right. The problems here are genuinely hard and often under-defined. You'll take large architectural bets in a domain where correctness is measured in real money and latency is measured on a live client trade. Key Responsibilities • Own the architecture of the Client Trading Engine, Pricing Engine, Risk Management Engine, and Smart Hedging. • Break complex, ambiguous systems into smaller components with clear contracts, clear scope, and independent deliverability. • Set and drive the architectural vision for trading and hedging, and take large architectural bets through to completion. • Build for scale — design systems that hold up as volume, venues, and currency corridors grow. • Own the observability standard across all components, so the behaviour of the trade and risk path is legible when it matters. • Design meaningful alerting, fallback, and recovery strategies across systems. • Coach and mentor engineers on the team, and raise the technical bar through design reviews and feedback. • Partner with product, risk, and the two pod EMs to connect architectural decisions to TPV, gross revenue, and net revenue outcomes. What we are looking for Must-haves: • 7–12 years of experience building and operating production backend systems. • Deep experience with distributed systems — consistency, failure modes, and the trade-offs between them. • Experience building orchestrators and complex, long-running workflows that must be durable and recoverable. • Strong command of databases at scale — sharding, multi-region deployments, and the data protection constraints that shape them. • Track record on high-scale systems, including the observability and operational tooling that keeps them healthy. • Comfort with abstract, ambiguous problems — you're the person who turns a vague mandate into scoped, sequenced deliverables. • Hands-on. You still write code, and your architectural judgment comes from building. • Heavy AI user. You use AI coding tools with real technique and get materially more done because of it. • Influential and collaborative. You set direction by inspiring and persuading people, not by relying on authority. • Data-driven, and you operate with high agency — you find the important problem and go solve it. What helps you stand out: • Background in fintech, trading, or cryptocurrencies. • Experience handling financial data — pricing, positions, PnL, or market data. • Experience with pricing, spread, or hedging systems specifically. • Experience with market microstructure or multi-venue execution and smart order routing. What Success Looks Like • The trading and hedging systems you own are correct, observable, and resilient — failures are contained, detected early, and recoverable. • Architectural decisions hold up without fundamental rework within 12 to 18 months. • Engineers across both pods ship faster because of the abstractions, tooling, and standards you've built. • Systemic risks are anticipated and addressed before they become incidents or PnL surprises. • You've raised the technical ceiling of trading and hedging engineering at OpenFX, not just delivered individual projects. 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.