Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform

ABOUT AIRWALLEX Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. More than 675,000 businesses, including McLaren Racing, Qantas, SHEIN, and TikTok, use us, directly or through our platform partners, to run their financial operations or build and monetize financial products of their own. We started in Melbourne in 2015 to build the infrastructure global commerce runs on. We're the regulated backbone behind global payments: not by accident, but by design. A decade plus, 85+ licenses, and a financial infrastructure spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. We're co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, with more than 2,700 people across 27 offices. We hire builders with founder-level energy, people who move fast with good judgment, dig in with real curiosity, and make calls from first principles rather than waiting to be told what to do. Read our operating principles https://www.airwallex.com/en-us/operating-principles to see it in full.   HOW YOU'LL MAKE IMPACT Airwallex is building a data and AI platform that helps teams turn information into better decisions and action. You'll shape the architecture, development, and operation of the systems that make this possible across the company. - Set the technical direction for Airwallex's data and AI platforms, shaping reliable systems that turn data and AI into measurable business impact. - Lead the identification and resolution of company-wide challenges through scalable data platform solutions, working across teams to influence technical roadmaps and decision-making. - Build and evolve the infrastructure behind Airwallex's data ecosystem, including Databricks, Spark, Kafka, real-time analytics, knowledge retrieval and indexing, model infrastructure, and agent capabilities. - Raise the bar on engineering craft, platform governance, security, reliability, and operational excellence while staying hands-on with complex technical problems. - Mentor engineers and technical contributors, helping build a high-performing team and a culture of innovation, ownership, and continuous learning. You'll work from our Singapore office five days a week. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR ESSENTIALS - 8+ years of experience in data platforms, data engineering, distributed systems, or an equivalent combination of professional and academic experience in a quantitative field. - Experience leading company-wide initiatives across multiple teams or influencing technical roadmap planning. - A track record of collaborating with diverse teams and stakeholders to deliver tangible business outcomes. - The ability to balance execution and velocity with rigorous research, statistical understanding, and scalable system design. - Experience mentoring and investing in the development of engineers, scientists, and peers. - Technical leadership experience across significant data platform projects, including ETL frameworks, metrics stores, infrastructure management, and data security. - Experience building, deploying, and maintaining reliable, multi-region data pipelines at scale. - Familiarity with workflow and orchestration frameworks such as Airflow or dbt. PREFERRED - Hands-on experience designing data processing patterns for a modern lakehouse architecture. - Experience designing and developing standard framework modules, high-performance services, and client libraries for big data systems. - Experience with technologies such as GCP, Databricks, BigQuery, Dataproc, Kafka, Kubernetes, Spark, Dataflow, Google Cloud Storage, and Airflow. - Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to tailor technical concepts for leadership, users, and company-wide audiences. - Experience rapidly evaluating technologies and running proofs of concept to inform architecture decisions. - Experience thriving in a complex, fast-moving environment. YOU'LL THRIVE HERE IF - You're comfortable owning the roadmap yourself. - You own the outcome and you don't wait for permission to fix what's broken. - You're comfortable with ambiguity. Give you a problem, not a prescription, and you'll run with it. - You enjoy working closely with people across multiple countries and time zones as part of one connected, global team, including flexing your hours occasionally to make that connection work. - You value in-person collaboration and are happy being in the office five days a week. LEARN MORE ABOUT YOUR TEAM The Knowledge Platform sits at the foundation of Airwallex’s Data and AI strategy. We are evolving traditional data infrastructure into knowledge infrastructure—turning structured and unstructured information into trusted, reusable context that helps people and AI systems make better decisions and take action. You’ll build the platform end to end, from core technologies such as Databricks, Clickhouse, Spark, and Kafka to real-time analytics, knowledge retrieval and indexing, model infrastructure, agent capabilities, and AI interaction history. You’ll also develop the evaluation, annotation, feedback, governance, permission, and freshness frameworks required to operate AI reliably at global financial scale. Our mission is making this ecosystem truly agent-ready. That means enabling teams to explore data through natural language, investigate business drivers in real time, and give AI systems secure access to the context and capabilities they need to support decisions and execute workflows. If you want to build the foundation that turns Airwallex’s data into knowledge, knowledge into intelligence, and intelligence into measurable business impact, this is where that work happens. APPLICANT SAFETY POLICY: FRAUD AND THIRD-PARTY RECRUITERS To protect you from recruitment scams, please be aware that Airwallex will not ask for bank details, sensitive ID numbers (i.e. passport), or any form of payment during the application or interview process. All official communication will come from an @airwallex.com http://airwallex.com email address. Please apply only through careers.airwallex.com http://careers.airwallex.com or our official LinkedIn page. Airwallex does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firms/recruiters. Airwallex will not pay any fees to search firms/recruiters if a candidate is submitted by a search firm/recruiter unless an agreement has been entered into with respect to specific open position(s). Search firms/recruiters submitting resumes to Airwallex on an unsolicited basis shall be deemed to accept this condition, regardless of any other provision to the contrary. EQUAL OPPORTUNITY Airwallex is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and anyone seeking employment at Airwallex is considered based on merit, qualifications, competence and talent. We don’t regard color, religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, ancestry, citizenship, sex, marital or family status, disability, gender, or any other legally protected status when making our hiring decisions. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.