Staff Software Engineer, Payments

The role

You will define the technical direction for the Payments Platform and lead architecture decisions. You will build scalable backend services, REST APIs, and event-driven systems within a microservices architecture.

What you will do

• Define the technical direction for the Payments Platform
• Lead architecture decisions
• Build highly reliable, high-volume distributed systems
• Design and build scalable backend services, REST APIs, event-driven systems and integration components
• Drive complex initiatives across payment gateways, acquiring, issuing, card networks and local payment methods
• Partner with product, business, infrastructure and external engineering teams
• Raise the engineering bar through architectural reviews, design practices, code quality, testing, observability, reliability and mentorship

Required qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including Staff-level technical leadership or equivalent ownership of complex backend systems
• Strong experience designing and operating high-volume distributed systems
• Recent hands-on experience with Java or Kotlin and Spring or Spring Boot
• Expert experience building REST APIs, backend microservices, Kafka-based event streams and distributed data stores such as Cassandra, Hazelcast, Oracle Coherence or similar
• Experience with cloud platforms such as GCP or AWS, plus Docker and Kubernetes
• Strong familiarity with observability and operational tooling such as New Relic, StatsD, ELK, Datadog, Prometheus or similar
• Proven ability to lead projects from concept to production, with a focus on quality, testing, reliability and maintainability
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence across engineering, product and business stakeholders

Nice to have

• Experience building payment gateways, acquiring platforms, issuing platforms or payment acceptance infrastructure
• Experience integrating major card networks such as Visa and Mastercard
• Experience with local payment methods such as iDEAL, Klarna, Trustly or similar
• Familiarity with authorisation, capture, refunds, chargebacks, settlement, reconciliation, fraud, risk or PCI/compliance workflows
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and leading cross-team technical initiatives

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.