Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform

The role

You will shape the architecture, development, and operation of data and AI platforms. You will build infrastructure including Databricks, Spark, Kafka, and model infrastructure to turn information into decisions.

What you will do

• Set the technical direction for Airwallex's data and AI platforms.
• Lead the identification and resolution of company-wide challenges through scalable data platform solutions.
• Build and evolve the infrastructure behind Airwallex's data ecosystem.
• Raise the bar on engineering craft, platform governance, security, reliability, and operational excellence.
• Mentor engineers and technical contributors.
• Develop evaluation, annotation, feedback, governance, permission, and freshness frameworks.

Required qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in data platforms, data engineering, distributed systems, or an equivalent combination of professional and academic experience in a quantitative field.
• Experience leading company-wide initiatives across multiple teams or influencing technical roadmap planning.
• A track record of collaborating with diverse teams and stakeholders to deliver tangible business outcomes.
• The ability to balance execution and velocity with rigorous research, statistical understanding, and scalable system design.
• Experience mentoring and investing in the development of engineers, scientists, and peers.
• Technical leadership experience across significant data platform projects, including ETL frameworks, metrics stores, infrastructure management, and data security.
• Experience building, deploying, and maintaining reliable, multi-region data pipelines at scale.
• Familiarity with workflow and orchestration frameworks such as Airflow or dbt.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience designing data processing patterns for a modern lakehouse architecture.
• Experience designing and developing standard framework modules, high-performance services, and client libraries for big data systems.
• Experience with technologies such as GCP, Databricks, BigQuery, Dataproc, Kafka, Kubernetes, Spark, Dataflow, Google Cloud Storage, and Airflow.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Experience rapidly evaluating technologies and running proofs of concept to inform architecture decisions.
• Experience thriving in a complex, fast-moving environment.

About the company

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