Senior Backend Engineer (L5) -Payments

openfx; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 3,000,000 - 6,000,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenFX is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for our Payments team. This senior IC will own the technical direction for payment orchestration, corridor and partner integrations, FX and quoting, and the end-to-end payment lifecycle from initiation to settlement confirmation.

You will lead the hardest corridor and orchestration problems, ensure robust controls for regulators, and mentor senior engineers across product, compliance, and partnerships.

Qualifications

• Senior backend engineer owning complex production systems.
• Experience with payment systems, orchestration and partner integrations.
• Strong knowledge of idempotency, exactly‑once, and money‑path failure modes.

Responsibilities

• Own technical direction for payments, orchestration, and settlement.
• Lead corridor expansion architecture and partner adapters.
• Ensure reliability, observability, and incident response for payment flows.
• Mentor engineers and collaborate with product, compliance, risk, and partnerships.

Skills

Senior backend engineer

Payment systems

Orchestration

Partner integrations

Distributed systems

Idempotency

Exactly‑once

TypeScript / Node

Cloud infrastructure

Job description

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, Affi

Affirm, Polygon, Kraken, Nium & others. We're backed by Accel, Lightspeed, NfX and other top-tier investors.

Role Overview

We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer for our Payments team. This is the senior-most individual contributor role on the systems that move money across borders - payment orchestration, corridor and partner integrations, FX and quoting, the payment lifecycle from initiation to settlement confirmation, and the regulated controls (safeguarding, transaction monitoring) that our EU licenses demand.

It is a hands-on technical leadership role on the money path, where a new corridor is only as good as its failure handling, and a regulatory control is only as good as the evidence it produces. The cost of a defect is measured in real money, stuck customer payments, or a finding from a regulator.

You will report to an Engineering Manager and work closely with engineers, product, compliance, and partnerships across the company. You will set the technical direction for payments, lead the hardest corridor and orchestration problems, and raise the bar for how we build.

This role requires someone who has built and operated payment or other correctness-critical systems in production, ideally against external partners whose behavior you do not control. If your experience is limited to systems where occasional data inconsistency is acceptable, where every dependency was internal and well-behaved, or where you have not owned something end to end for a meaningful stretch, this will be a stretch.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction for payments: payment orchestration, corridor and partner integrations, FX and quoting, lifecycle modelling (statuses, webhooks, returns, recalls), and settlement confirmation.


• Design the corridor expansion architecture: turn new-corridor launches (EUR, MXN, COP, AED, and beyond) from bespoke integration projects into configuration-driven, repeatable capability - standardized partner adapters, corridor config over code, and a rigorous definition of launch-ready.


• Lead the engineering of regulated controls: safeguarding flows (segregation, sweeps, coverage reconciliation) and transaction monitoring pipelines, built so that every control produces an audit trail that stands up to regulators and auditors.


• Define and maintain the standards for money-path code - idempotency, exactly-once effects, consistency guarantees under partner failure, safe retries against external systems, and backward-compatible API evolution.


• Own resilience against partners: degraded-mode behavior, failover and routing across redundant partners, cut-off handling, and reconciliation as a first-class design concern rather than an afterthought.


• Own the reliability and observability bar for payment flows, and lead incident response when money is stuck or a partner is down.


• Lead architecture reviews for new corridors, partner integrations, and high-risk changes where correctness and auditability matter most.


• Mentor senior engineers and help set what great looks like when hiring.


• Partner across product, compliance, risk, and banking partnerships, translating technical trade-offs for non-engineering audiences - including why a corridor cannot launch until its returns path is real.

What We Are Looking For

Must-haves

• Significant experience as a senior or staff-level backend engineer, with a track record of owning complex systems in production.


• Has built or operated payment systems in production - orchestration, partner integrations, or payment lifecycle systems - with a working grasp of money-path failure modes: duplicates, partial failures, cut‑off misses, stuck or lost payments.


• Has integrated external banking, payment, or FX partners and lived through the messy reality: sandbox‑vs‑production drift, certificate and credential churn, undocumented behavior, partner outages.


• Sound judgment on correctness under failure - retries against external systems, idempotency, exactly‑once effects, and safe handling of critical data.


• Deep expertise in distributed systems and a strong grasp of reliability, performance, and scalability trade-offs.


• Excellent technical communication and the ability to lead initiatives across teams without formal authority.


• Fluency in a modern TypeScript / Node backend stack and cloud infrastructure.

What helps you stand out

• Cross-border payments experience: corridor launches, FX, SWIFT/SEPA or local clearing schemes in any of our target markets (EU, LATAM, Middle East, APAC).


• Experience building safeguarding, transaction monitorin