Multi Geo / Multi Cloud Application Architect

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 The Multi Geo / Multi Cloud Application Architect 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. 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. 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. Key Responsibilities: Multi-Region Architecture Design & Ownership Define and maintain the reference architecture for multi-region deployment: traffic routing, data replication, failover behaviour, and regional isolation boundaries 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 Design for regional independence: the ability to isolate a region for regulatory or operational reasons without degrading global capability Define standards for how new services must be designed to operate in a multi-region context from day one, not as a retrofit Multi-Cloud Strategy & Portability Maintain an architecture that avoids hard coupling to any single cloud provider for critical platform functions Evaluate where to leverage managed cloud services versus cloud-agnostic alternatives, with explicit reasoning about portability, cost, and operational overhead 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 Define and test cloud provider failover runbooks; ensure provider-level degradation can be responded to within defined RTO and RPO targets Data Sovereignty & Regulatory Architecture Design data routing, storage, and processing architectures that enforce jurisdictional data residency requirements across all regions OpenFX operates in Work with Compliance and Legal to translate regulatory obligations into concrete architectural constraints enforced at infrastructure and application layer Define the data classification framework for multi-region environments: what replicates globally, what stays regionally isolated, what requires explicit consent to move Ensure observability infrastructure produces the evidence needed to demonstrate data residency compliance to regulators Platform Reliability & Resilience Define availability and resilience targets; ensure the architecture is designed to meet them under realistic failure scenarios, not ju…