Chief of Staff

Chief of Staff

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. Our stellar team brings experience at companies such as J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, FalconX, PayPal, Affirm, Kraken, Nium and others. We are backed by Accel, Lightspeed, NfX, and other top-tier investors.

OpenFX is roughly 180 people across Dubai, Bangalore, London, Amsterdam, and Miami, heading toward 300 inside twelve months, and scaling from $8B toward $20B+ in monthly TPV. The business works and the strategy is clear. We are now in the phase where the constraint stops being what we decide and starts being how reliably we execute what we have already decided.

That is the phase this seat exists to solve. As Chief of Staff you are the force multiplier for everything internal: you own the executive operating system, the integrity of how the company plans and prioritizes, the signal the CEO sees, and whether decisions made at the top actually close.

One part of the seat is unusually technical. OpenFX is an engineering-heavy company moving from a single product to a multi-product company against permanently constrained engineering capacity, and the cost of that transition currently shows up as a coordination tax: conflicting priorities, unclear timelines, and prioritization decisions that get made late or informally. That requires enough product and engineering depth to hold Product, Design, and Engineering to a real prioritization discipline, and to know when an answer you are being given does not hold up.

What You'll Do

• Own the executive operating system end to end: leadership syncs, the strategic deep-dive calendar, the executive offsites, the bi-annual planning cycles. You maintain the single source of truth for every leadership commitment, and when something is late you say so directly to the executive who owns it. This cadence surfaces problems by design, so you are equally accountable for it surfacing wins.
• Detect cross-functional misalignment early. When two leaders form opposite positions, you find it in week one rather than week five. Your first move is not to mediate: you route the two leaders to each other with a 48-hour deadline and a required output. You broker only what direct resolution has genuinely failed to close, and you force into the room only what brokering cannot. Success is measured by the share of conflicts resolved without you, rising over time.
• Hold every function to a single prioritization discipline and enforce adherence to it. Drive the company-wide capacity allocation and roadmap forum: one resource model per function agreed by the people who own the work, one prioritized cross-functional list, and a written record of every tradeoff naming what was declined and at what cost. Product owns what to build and Engineering owns feasibility. You own whether the decision gets made explicitly, on a date, by the right people, and whether it holds. Twelve months in, every function should be visibly better at this discipline than it is today.
• Interrogate rather than relay. When a capacity estimate or a timeline does not hold up, you are expected to have the depth to know it and the standing to say so before it becomes a commitment.
• Own the architecture of how the company plans and reviews itself: the quarterly planning cycle, OKR integrity from company level down to sub-function, and the standard every review is held to. BizOps owns the metrics layer and the analysis; you own the forum, the tradeoffs it forces, and whether its decisions close.
• Own the signal the CEO sees. A synthesized weekly report every Friday, assembled across the RevOps, BizOps, and Product Ops leads rather than written alone, covering hiring pipeline health, onboarding, revenue by product line, engineering delivery and prioritization changes, partnerships, operational incidents, and cultural drift, tracked with the same rigor as revenue. Soft stuff is hard stuff: across five offices, drift is a when, not an if, and it should reach the CEO as signal, with a recommendation. Monthly and quarterly post-mortems on top of it.
• Go get the unfiltered version. Information reaching you has already passed through several layers of filtering, and that filtering is not always done well. You sit in the offices, take the hallway conversations, run skip-levels, and periodically tap the raw feed to make sure nothing important is being filtered away.
• Bring the top three things, not the thirty, and never bring a problem alone. Every observation arrives as observation, hypothesis for why it exists, and options. Calibrated judgment about what is genuinely urgent is a core part of the job.
• Develop the internal narrative. Company-wide communications, the monthly AMA, planning and offsite content, and the direction the organization needs to be pushed in. What gets highlighted, what gets named, and what the company is asked to care about next quarter.
• See around the corner. OpenFX will restructure more than once on the way from 180 to 500. You name what breaks at the next breakpoint before it breaks, tell the exec team which structures will not survive it, and identify the roles that must be in seat nine to twelve months ahead of need. You also own risk and crisis readiness: identifying medium and long-term structural risks and building the contingency and response protocols before they are needed rather than during.
• Take a single line of direction and return with the outcome delivered. Navigate the organization cross-functionally and close it without status requests, check-ins, or reminders. Every handoff from the CEO carries an explicit delegation level: execute as specified, recommend then act, or act then inform. If the level is missing, you ask once and the answer becomes the default for that category of work.
• Return work to the people who own it. When a leader brings a problem that is theirs, you place it back with them by name and date rather than carrying it to the CEO. Where delivering an outcome requires another function's effort, the work sits with that function and the outcome sits with you.
• Own the unsolved problems register. Maintain a standing, ranked list of the problems OpenFX has not cracked: the ones that have survived multiple attempts, sit between functions, or keep resurfacing under new names. Admission to the list requires a root cause, meaning the specific reason it has survived every previous attempt, which is almost never the problem itself but a missing owner, a misaligned incentive, or a decision nobody wants to make. Each quarter, bring the CEO the top of the list with a recommendation for how to solve it and how to staff it. He decides which ones become his; most should not, and routing the rest to the function that should own them, recommendation attached, is part of the judgment. This register is also where the consequential projects this seat takes on end to end get sourced.
• Build, operate, and transfer. Playbooks for performance review cycles, onboarding, offsite planning, and interview training get built here, run here until they are stable, and then handed to a named permanent owner. Nothing stays in this seat indefinitely.
• Manage the CEO's time as a portfolio. Baseline his actual allocation across the six responsibilities of the role: setting direction, aligning the organization, mobilizing through leaders, engaging the board, connecting with stakeholders, and managing personal effectiveness. You audit actual against intent quarterly and tell him, in writing, where the gap is and what consumed it. The standard is his time going to things no one else can do, in ways that magnify effectiveness, without getting mired in things that don't make a difference.
• Act as a trusted advisor to the CEO and the leadership team, elevating a point of view on operations and management decisions, including views nobody asked for. And tell the CEO what he needs to hear: when he has picked up work that belongs two levels below him, when a decision already made is being staged as an open discussion, and when a people call is being slow-walked.

What the CEO Retains

This seat runs the machinery of how the executive team operates. It does not replace the CEO in it, and the following stay personally with him, permanently: executive 1:1s and the development of his leaders, final accountability conversations, vision and direction, board engagement, and the enforcement backstop when an executive ignores the system. You design the forums, set the agendas, and make the machinery run. He shows up as the CEO inside them. This line exists for your protection as much as his. A Chief of Staff who sits between a CEO and his executives stops multiplying him and starts substituting for him, and the parts of the job that got substituted are the ones that were never delegable in the first place. That is how the CoS seat fails.

What You Should Bring

• Experience operating inside a company that grew through hypergrowth at Series C+, and firsthand knowledge of what breaks there.
• A track record of holding senior people accountable without positional