Staff Software Engineer, Risk

The role

You will be a senior technical leader and hands-on builder for the Risk Platform. You will own real-time detection platforms and client-facing risk and fraud management products.

What you will do

• Lead technical direction of core risk services including real-time detection and decision engines.
• Design and evolve distributed, event-driven risk systems.
• Own complex initiatives from design and technical specifications through implementation and rollout.
• Write high-quality production software primarily in Java and Spring Boot.
• Lead design reviews, RFCs, and architecture discussions.
• Partner with Engineering and Product Managers to shape the roadmap.
• Set standards for code quality, observability, reliability, security, and performance.
• Integrate models, rules, and features into production systems.
• Drive operational excellence through on-call readiness, incident response, and capacity planning.
• Mentor and uplevel engineers through technical coaching and design guidance.

Required qualifications

• 10+ years of back-end engineering experience.
• Substantial experience owning and operating complex distributed systems in production.
• Deep experience in risk, fraud, fintech, payments, banking, trading, or another high-stakes domain.
• Strong proficiency in Java, including multithreading, high-concurrency patterns, performance tuning, and networked service design.
• Hands-on experience designing distributed systems including event-driven architectures, partitioning, sharding, 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 for large-scale systems.
• Experience leading complex technical initiatives end to end and influencing stakeholders.
• Strong communication skills.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have

• Experience with risk-specific components such as rule engines, feature stores, and model-serving frameworks.
• Working knowledge of machine learning in production.
• Experience with modern data and storage technologies such as Cassandra, Redis, NoSQL, Hadoop, Kafka, Flink, or Spark.
• Polyglot engineering experience with Kotlin, Scala, Python, or Golang.
• Cloud experience with Alibaba Cloud, AWS, or GCP.
• Familiarity with regulatory and security standards such as PCI DSS and SOC 2.
• Demonstrated impact as a Staff or Principal Engineer in a high-growth, high-scale environment.

About the company

Airwallex is an AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. It provides financial infrastructure for over 675,000 businesses globally.