Engineering Lead, Scale

About Airwallex

Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. More than 676,000 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 2,300 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 to see it in full.

About the Team

The Scale engineering team at Airwallex builds the foundational systems that power our embedded finance platform at global scale. The team owns multi-tenant infrastructure, drives cross-domain product capabilities, and helps design technical solutions for enterprise customers.

Key areas of ownership include:

Embedded Finance Platform: Build and maintain the infrastructure powering customers like Rippling, Navan, Qantas, and SHEIN, with strong SLAs for availability, latency, and throughput.

Cross-Domain Product Features: Own complex features that span business, regulatory, and technical domains, such as tax, compliance, and monetization.

Solutions Architecture: Translate enterprise customer requirements into scalable technical solutions that support major commercial opportunities.

What you’ll do

As an Engineering Lead, Scale, you will lead a team building critical platform capabilities for Airwallex’s embedded finance products. This role combines people leadership, technical direction, and delivery ownership.

You will manage engineers directly and be accountable for team health, execution, and long-term technical quality. While you remain technically credible and involved at an architectural level, your focus is enabling the team to do its best work.

Responsibilities

• Manage, coach, and grow a team of engineers through feedback, performance management, and career development.

• Set technical direction for scalable, reliable backend systems and partner with senior engineers on architecture and design.

• Ensure high standards for system design, code quality, testing, and operational excellence.

• Drive improvements across reliability, observability, security, and developer productivity.

• Work cross-functionally with product, design, compliance, sales, and engineering leaders to align execution with business priorities.

• Help translate enterprise customer and commercial requirements into pragmatic technical solutions.

Who you are

Minimum qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 1+ years in a people leadership role.

• Strong backend development experience with Java/Spring Boot.

• Proven experience designing and operating large-scale, distributed production systems.

• Strong system design and object-oriented design fundamentals.

• Ability to balance abstraction, simplicity, and speed in technical decision-making.

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.

• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and lead technical execution.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience in fintech, payments, or other regulated domains.

• Experience with multi-tenant SaaS or platform architecture.

• Familiarity with PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, and cloud platforms such as AWS or GCP.

• Experience with API design, OAuth 2.0, or developer-facing platforms.

• Exposure to cross-region deployment, data residency, or customer-facing technical architecture.

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 email address. Please apply only through 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.