Staff Software Engineer
Airwallex
Staff Software Engineer
Airwallex
Runs global payments and accounts for businesses
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 to see it in full.
As a Staff Engineer on the Risk Platform, you’ll be a senior technical leader and hands-on builder. You’ll own critical parts of our real-time detection platform and client-facing risk and fraud management products, setting technical direction and raising the engineering bar while working closely with your manager and cross-functional partners.
Lead the technical direction of core risk services, including real-time detection, decision engines, and risk tooling, ensuring they’re reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient under high-throughput and low-latency constraints.
Design and evolve distributed, event-driven risk systems—including microservices, streaming pipelines, feature stores, and model-serving layers—that support global products and regulatory requirements.
Own complex initiatives end to end, from high-level design and technical specifications through implementation, rollout, and continuous improvement.
Stay hands-on in code and design, writing high-quality production software primarily in Java and Spring Boot, and leading design reviews, RFCs, and architecture discussions.
Partner with the Engineering Manager and Product Manager to shape the roadmap, define technical milestones, and translate business and risk objectives into robust engineering solutions.
Raise the engineering bar across the Risk Platform stack by setting standards for code quality, observability, reliability, security, and performance.
Improve detection effectiveness by integrating models, rules, and features into production systems, and by designing experimentation and evaluation capabilities with data and ML teams.
Drive operational excellence through stronger on-call readiness, incident response, postmortems, SLIs/SLOs, capacity planning, and resilience patterns such as graceful degradation, fallbacks, retries, timeouts, and backpressure.
Mentor and uplevel engineers, including senior individual contributors, through technical coaching, pair programming, design guidance, and feedback.
Collaborate with platform, data, SRE, security, and product engineering teams to define clear interfaces, SLAs, and ownership boundaries for shared services and infrastructure.
Identify and pay down technical debt deliberately, balancing short-term impact with long-term platform health.
You’ll work from our Singapore office five days a week.
10+ years of back-end engineering experience, including substantial experience owning and operating complex distributed systems in production.
Deep experience in risk, fraud, fintech, payments, banking, trading, or another high-stakes domain where correctness and reliability are critical.
Strong proficiency in Java, including multithreading, high-concurrency patterns, performance tuning, and networked service design across I/O/NIO, HTTP/TCP, and REST.
Hands-on experience designing distributed systems, including event-driven architectures, partitioning and sharding, consistency models, caching strategies, and resilience patterns.
Proficiency with Spring or Spring Boot and build tools such as Gradle or Maven.
Practical production experience with Docker and Kubernetes.
Solid understanding of observability and operations, including logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and incident management for large-scale systems.
Experience leading complex technical initiatives end to end and influencing engineers and stakeholders without relying on formal management authority.
Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical topics clearly to engineers, product managers, and non-technical stakeholders.
A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Experience with risk-specific components such as rule engines, feature stores, model-serving frameworks, real-time stream processing, and A/B testing or experimentation platforms.
Working knowledge of machine learning in production, including model lifecycle, feature engineering, evaluation metrics, and online/offline consistency.
Experience with modern data and storage technologies such as Cassandra, Redis, NoSQL databases, Hadoop, Kafka, Flink, or Spark.
Polyglot engineering experience with Kotlin, Scala, Python, or Golang.
Cloud experience with Alibaba Cloud, AWS, or GCP, including cloud networking, security best practices, and cost awareness.
Familiarity with regulatory and security standards relevant to payments and financial services, such as PCI DSS, SOC 2, and data privacy and protection best practices.
Demonstrated impact as a Staff or Principal Engineer, or equivalent, in a high-growth, high-scale environment.
You’re comfortable owning the roadmap yourself.
You’re comfortable making decisions with incomplete information and moving quickly anyway.
You hold yourself to a high standard even when no one is watching. Quality and accountability aren't external expectations, they're internal ones.
You’re comfortable operating across time zones with a globally distributed team, including colleagues based in APAC and EMEA.
You connect dots across functions and hold the big picture without losing grip on the details.
Risk Platform builds the decisioning infrastructure that sits between Airwallex and every dollar that moves through it, protecting 150,000+ businesses moving over US$260 billion a year across 200+ countries and 90+ currencies, and deciding, often in milliseconds, whether a new signup is real, a payment is safe, or a login is who they claim to be. The hard part is that fraud evolves fast, and every decision carries a two-sided cost: miss an attack and money is lost, over-block and a legitimate business can't get paid. We build this with streaming pipelines processing billions of events a day, graph databases exposing coordinated fraud rings, ML models scoring every transaction, and LLM agents that triage alerts. You don't need a fintech background, just an appetite for adversarial systems problems where the scoreboard is measured in dollars. If you want to help scale one of the world's fastest-growing financial platforms safely, this is the team.
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.
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.
Airwallex runs a financial platform for businesses that sell, buy and operate across borders, from startups to large enterprises. Its multi-currency accounts let customers receive and hold money locally, then pay overseas suppliers without converting every sale into their home currency. Businesses also use its corporate cards and expense controls to manage spending, while online sellers accept customer payments through its checkout tools. Finance teams work in a web app, and developers embed the services in other software; Airwallex earns transaction fees and charges for paid software plans. Founded in Melbourne in 2015, Airwallex has dual headquarters in Singapore and San Francisco.
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