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Aptos is a Layer 1 blockchain focused on financial services, offering sub-second settlement and sub-cent costs. The company is consolidating commercial efforts into a financial services unit with payments as the first chartered business—a ring-fenced unit with its own P&L, an exclusive global settlement partnership already signed, and first-party products shipped (keyless onboarding, multisig treasury, confidential payments).
This is the founding technical leadership role for the payments unit. You are hire number one of the engineering team, and the build you lead defines the business.
You will own: (1) The Aptos Payment API—spec, ship, and run the single API businesses integrate against, wrapping partner infrastructure today with an orchestration engine routing across a licensed partner network as the business scales. You write the spec bottoms-up from partner and client requirements. (2) Partner-facing engineering—you are the technical face of the unit, handling requirements intake, integration leadership, and technical diligence with banks, EMIs, PSPs, stablecoin issuers, and e-wallet platforms. (3) Trust infrastructure including revenue attribution and reconciliation, single-window KYC/KYB integration, a testnet sandbox for prospects, and native-asset-only settlement policy. (4) Integration with the trading stack—own the payments side of the seam between payments and RFQ liquidity/tokenized-FX systems, define the API contract, and make the handoff invisible to clients. (5) Team and decisions—hire and lead the first two engineers, grow the team as revenue triggers fire, and make build-vs-buy decisions with written memos at each gate.
First 90 days: publish Payment API v1 spec and ship testnet sandbox; stand up revenue attribution v1 and harden USDT/USDC settlement rails to production grade; ship the first client integration hands-on end-to-end; draft the orchestration build-vs-buy memo.
Required: 8+ years building payment infrastructure at production scale (PSP or orchestrator-class systems: cross-border rails, on/off-ramps, virtual accounts, reconciliation); hands-on chain-native settlement experience (stablecoin rails, ramp integrations, wallet infrastructure); front-facing gravitas with banks and regulated partners; product engineer's instincts; player-coach mentality.
Nice to have: APAC corridor experience, FX and market-structure fluency, payments regulation familiarity, prior 0→1 founding experience.
