Senior Software Engineer, Data Platform & AI Enablement

Airwallex • San Francisco, CA

1d

About The Position

Airwallex is the only unified payments and financial platform for global businesses. Powered by our unique combination of proprietary infrastructure and software, we empower over 200,000 businesses worldwide – including Brex, Rippling, Navan, Qantas, SHEIN and many more – with fully integrated solutions to manage everything from business accounts, payments, spend management and treasury, to embedded finance at a global scale.
Proudly founded in Melbourne, we have a team of over 2,000 of the brightest and most innovative people in tech across 26 offices around the globe. Valued at US$8 billion and backed by world-leading investors including T. Rowe Price, Visa, Mastercard, Robinhood Ventures, Sequoia, Salesforce Ventures, DST Global, and Lone Pine Capital, Airwallex is leading the charge in building the global payments and financial platform of the future. If you’re ready to do the most ambitious work of your career, join us.
The Platform Engineering team is architecting Airwallex’s next-generation foundational infrastructure. We are moving beyond standard pipelines to build a high-performance, distributed ecosystem that powers real-time AI enablement and global financial data.
We aim to push the boundaries of distributed storage, stream processing, and service-layer interfaces. We are looking for "Engineers’ Engineers"—builders who enjoy diving into the internals of distributed systems, optimizing JVM performance, and implementing robust architectural patterns like Lakehouse and real-time data.

Requirements

• Experience: Have 5+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems or infrastructure platforms.
• First Principles Thinking: Possess a deep understanding of computer science fundamentals, including distributed systems, memory management, and networking protocols.
• The "Builder" Stack: Are proficient in Java, Kotlin, or Go. You should have hands-on experience (or the desire to deep-dive) into the internals of Kafka, Flink, Spark, Kubernetes, or OLAP engines.
• Ownership Mindset: Have a proven track record of taking 0-1 ownership of complex technical challenges, from initial design to production stability.
• Curiosity & Impact: Are intrinsically motivated to explore emerging tech in AI/ML infrastructure and real-time systems to create tangible business impact.

Responsibilities

• Architect & Build: Lead technical decision-making and custom development for core infrastructure components, extending from foundational storage to high-availability service layers.
• Systems Optimization: Deep-dive into performance tuning and systems internals—such as state management, checkpointing, and exactly-once semantics—to ensure millisecond-level accuracy at global scale.
• AI Infrastructure: Develop and integrate the "Knowledge Platform," enabling AI-driven products through scalable vector indexing, agentic workflows, and real-time data streaming.
• Distributed Systems at Scale: Own the full SDLC for high-performance distributed systems (batch and streaming) that process petabytes of data across 30+ global regions.
• Engineering Rigor: Advocate for elite software engineering practices, contributing to shared tooling, SDKs, and automation frameworks that enhance the productivity of engineering teams company-wide.
• Mentorship: Act as a technical beacon and mentor for mid-level engineers, driving project delivery through design reviews and technical leadership.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed