Senior Software Engineer, Data Platform & AI Enablement

About Airwallex

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 200000 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 2200 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 youre ready to do the most ambitious work of your career join us.

Attributes We Value

We hire successful builders with founder-like energy who want real impact accelerated learning and true ownership. You bring strong role-related expertise and sharp thinking and youre motivated by our mission and operating principles. You move fast with good judgment dig deep with curiosity and make decisions from first principles balancing speed and rigor.

Youre humble and collaborative; turn zerotoone ideas into real products and you get stuff done end-to-end. You use AI to work smarter and solve problems faster. Here youll tackle complex highvisibility problems with exceptional teammates and grow your career as we build the future of global banking. If that sounds like you lets build whats next.

About the team:

The Knowledge Platform team is at the heart of our companys data and AI strategy. We are building the foundational infrastructure that empowers the entire company to leverage data AI and ML into business impact. We accomplish this by creating platforms that handle the entire data and AI/ML lifecycle simplifying the interface while providing proper safety and governance. This includes managing our data infrastructure (Databricks Spark Kafka etc.) the technology to serve that data to our users (RAG MCP etc.) and the platform to host and govern these AI/ML models.

In 2026 our teams overarching mission is to evolve our full data ecosystemencompassing both platform and modelsinto a fully AI agent-ready infrastructure; we will empower customers to engage directly with the data platform to extract actionable value through capabilities like analytics and natural language querying while also upgrading the platform to deliver robust real-time performance for instant data-driven decision-making.

What youll do

In this role you will lead the architecture and construction of core infrastructure components taking full ownership of technical decision-making and custom development from foundational storage to high-availability service layers. You will perform deep-dives into systems internals and performance tuningfocusing on state management checkpointing and exactly-once semanticsto ensure millisecond-level accuracy and reliability across 30 global regions. A significant portion of your impact will involve developing the Knowledge Platform to power AI-driven products through scalable vector indexing agentic workflows and real-time data streaming.

Beyond the initial build you will own the full SDLC for high-performance distributed systems that process petabytes of data at a global scale. As a champion of engineering rigor you will advocate for elite software practices and contribute to shared tooling SDKs and automation frameworks that enhance productivity across the entire organization. Finally you will serve as a technical beacon and mentor for mid-level engineers driving high-quality project delivery through meticulous design reviews and hands-on technical leadership.

This is a hybrid role based in San Francisco.

Who you are:

• 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.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Hands-on design experience in crafting data processing patterns for a modern Lakehouse architecture.

• Contribute to the design and development of standard framework modules high-performance services and client libraries for big data using tools like GCP Databricks BigQuery DataProc Kafka Kubernetes Spark DataFlow Google Cloud Storage and Airflow.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills tailored for diverse audiences (leadership users company-wide).

• Ability to rapidly evaluate various technologies and conduct proof of concepts to drive architecture design.

• Experience thriving in a complex environment.

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 @ email address. Please apply only through 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 dont 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.

Required Experience:

Senior IC