Multi Geo / Multi Cloud Application Architect

<p><strong>About Us</strong></p> <p>OpenFX is on a mission to <strong>move money as freely as data, unrestricted by time zones, banking hours, or legacy systems.</strong> 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 &amp; others. We’re backed by Accel, Lightspeed, NfX and other top-tier investors.</p> <p><strong>Role Overview</strong></p> <p>The <strong>Multi Geo / Multi Cloud Application Architect</strong> at OpenFX owns the design and integrity of a payments and FX platform that must operate across multiple geographic regions and cloud environments without compromising on availability, data sovereignty, latency, or regulatory compliance. This is not a role that designs architecture in the abstract. You are responsible for decisions that determine whether a settlement clears in London during an AWS eu-west-1 degradation, whether a client in the UAE can transact without their data leaving the region, and whether OpenFX can migrate between cloud providers without a full platform rewrite.</p> <p>Cross-border payments and FX are inherently distributed problems. Transactions originate in one jurisdiction, clear through correspondent networks in another, and settle in a third. The infrastructure that supports this must match that complexity with equivalent architectural rigour. You are the person who ensures it does.</p> <p>You operate at the intersection of distributed systems engineering, cloud infrastructure, and financial regulatory compliance. You work closely with the Principal Architect, Platform team, pod-level Tech Leads, and the Security and Compliance functions to define standards, validate designs, and resolve the hardest architectural trade-offs the organisation faces.</p> <p><strong>Key Responsibilities:</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>Multi-Region Architecture Design &amp; Ownership</strong> <ul> <li>Define and maintain the reference architecture for multi-region deployment: traffic routing, data replication, failover behaviour, and regional isolation boundaries</li> <li>Own architectural decisions that govern how services are deployed, scaled, and failed over across regions; ensure those decisions are documented and revisited as the platform evolves</li> <li>Design for regional independence: the ability to isolate a region for regulatory or operational reasons without degrading global capability</li> <li>Define standards for how new services must be designed to operate in a multi-region context from day one, not as a retrofit</li> </ul> </li> <li><strong>Multi-Cloud Strategy &amp; Portability</strong> <ul> <li>Maintain an architecture that avoids hard coupling to any single cloud provider for critical platform functions</li> <li>Evaluate where to leverage managed cloud services versus cloud-agnostic alternatives, with explicit reasoning about portability, cost, and operational overhead</li> <li>Lead design of abstraction layers and platform primitives (with the Platform pod) that allow services to run across cloud environments without service-level re-engineering</li> <li>Define and test cloud provider failover runbooks; ensure provider-level degradation can be responded to within defined RTO and RPO targets</li> </ul> </li> <li><strong>Data Sovereignty &amp; Regulatory Architecture</strong> <ul> <li>Design data routing, storage, and processing architectures that enforce jurisdictional data residency requirements across all regions OpenFX operates in</li> <li>Work with Compliance and Legal to translate regulatory obligations into concrete architectural constraints enforced at infrastructure and application layer</li> <li>Define the data classification framework for multi-region environments: what replicates globally, what stays regionally isolated, what requires explicit consent to move</li> <li>Ensure observability infrastructure produces the evidence needed to demonstrate data residency compliance to regulators</li> </ul> </li> <li><strong>Platform Reliability &amp; Resilience</strong> <ul> <li>Define availability and resilience targets; ensure the architecture is designed to meet them under realistic failure scenarios, not just nominal conditions</li> <li>Lead chaos engineering and failure mode analysis exercises to validate that failover, replication, and multi-cloud fallback behave as designed</li> <li>Own the observability architecture across multi-region, multi-cloud deployments: unified logging, distributed tracing, and alerting that works coherently regardless of where workloads run</li> <li>Establish SLO / SLA frameworks that reflect the availability and latency commitments OpenFX makes to clients and liquidity providers</li> </ul> </li> <li><strong>Cross-Team Architecture Governance</strong> <ul> <li>Conduct architecture reviews for significant features, integrations, and infrastructure changes across all pods; ensure multi-region and multi-cloud implications are addressed before build begins</li> <li>Maintain and evolve the ADR library; ensure decisions are current and discoverable by engineers across the organisation</li> <li>Work with pod Tech Leads to identify and address architectural drift where production systems have deviated from intended design</li> <li>Contribute to the Platform pod's roadmap: identify shared infrastructure investments that reduce the cost of multi-region operation for all pods</li> </ul> </li> </ul> <p><strong>What we are looking for</strong></p> <p><strong>Must-haves:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Deep expertise in multi-region application design: active-active and active-passive topologies, global load balancing, regional failover, and cross-region replication strategies</li> <li>Strong hands-on experience with at least two major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) and a clear understanding of where provider capabilities diverge in ways that matter for financial workloads</li> <li>Proficiency in cloud-agnostic infrastructure patterns: Kubernetes (multi-cluster federation, cross-region networking), service mesh architectures, and infrastructure-as-code tooling (Terraform, Pulumi)</li> <li>Solid understanding of networking fundamentals at scale: BGP, Anycast, CDN strategies, private interconnects, and east-west traffic management across regions</li> <li>Familiarity with distributed data consistency models: eventual consistency, strong consistency trade-offs, CRDTs, and conflict resolution strategies in globally distributed databases</li> <li>Understanding of data residency and sovereignty requirements across key OpenFX operating jurisdictions: UAE (ADGM / DFSA), UK (FCA), EU (GDPR / PSD2), and other relevant frameworks</li> <li>Familiarity with financial infrastructure concepts: payment rail latency, settlement finality, FX liquidity provider connectivity, and correspondent banking dependencies</li> <li>Ability to produce ADRs, reference architectures, and design documents that are precise enough for engineers to implement from and clear enough for product and compliance to validate against</li> <li>Strong systems thinking: able to reason about failure modes, blast radius, and cascade effects in complex distributed systems</li> <li>Communicates complex architectural constraints and trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders</li> </ul> <p><strong>What We Offer</strong></p> <ul> <li>Competitive salary and benefits package.</li> <li>Equity in a rapidly growing company.</li> <li>Opportunity to work in a fast-paced startup at the forefront of fintech innovation.</li> <li>Opportunity to make a significant impact on global financial infrastructure</li> <li>Collaborative work culture with emphasis on personal and professional growth.</li> </ul> <p>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.&nbsp;</p>