Engineering Director, Agentic AI Data Platform

The role

You will lead the data platform engineering team responsible for the data backbone of financial systems. You will set technical direction for data ingestion, Databricks lakehouse, data orchestration, and canonical financial models.

What you will do

• Lead and grow a high-performing data platform engineering team
• Set technical strategy for high-volume financial data ingestion
• Lead the evolution of the Databricks lakehouse
• Define standards for data contracts, schema evolution, and data quality
• Evolve the platform from batch toward near-real-time processing
• Own the architecture of canonical financial models
• Partner with infrastructure and platform teams for production foundations
• Guide infrastructure strategy across GCP, Terraform, Kubernetes/GKE, Helm, GitOps, and CI/CD
• Lead migrations from legacy pipelines to the lakehouse
• Drive performance and cost optimisation across PostgreSQL and Databricks

Required qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in data platform, backend, or infrastructure engineering
• Significant experience leading engineering teams
• Proven experience managing and developing senior engineers and technical leads
• Deep expertise in data platforms, distributed systems, data modelling, and production data pipelines
• Strong experience with Python and SQL
• Hands-on experience with Spark, Databricks, Delta Lake, dbt, and modern lakehouse architectures
• Experience building reliable ingestion systems with large-scale backfills, incremental processing, checkpointing, rate-limit handling, idempotency, and failure recovery
• Strong understanding of streaming and event-driven architectures, including Kafka, CDC, and micro-batching
• Experience with data orchestration platforms such as Dagster
• Experience optimising PostgreSQL and analytical workloads for performance and cost
• Experience operating production infrastructure on GCP, with familiarity with Terraform, Kubernetes/GKE, Helm, GitOps, and CI/CD
• Strong understanding of observability, reliability engineering, and production operations

Nice to have

• Experience building data platforms for financial systems, accounting, payments, or other highly regulated products
• Experience applying AI-assisted engineering practices in production environments

About the company

Airwallex is an AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. It provides the regulated backbone for global payments with infrastructure spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.