Staff Software Engineer, Backend - Scale

About Airwallex

Airwallex is a comprehensive financial and payments platform serving global businesses. Leveraging proprietary technology and infrastructure, the company supports over 250,000 companies worldwide—including Brex, Navan, Qantas, and SHEIN—with end-to-end solutions for business accounts, payments, spending oversight, treasury, and embedded finance at scale. Founded in Melbourne, Airwallex employs over 2,300 tech professionals across 27 global offices. Valued at $11 billion USD and backed by leading investors like T. Rowe Price, Visa, Mastercard, Sequoia, and Salesforce Ventures, Airwallex is driving the future of global financial services.

Team and Role Overview

The Scale Team develops and maintains the multi-tenant embedded finance platform powering large enterprise clients such as Brex and Qantas. This includes architecting highly available, low-latency systems capable of cross-data-center functionality and handling enterprise-grade volumes. The role also involves creating features that integrate complex business, regulatory, and technical knowledge, as well as architecting solutions for enterprise prospects to facilitate sales of multimillion-dollar contracts.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and develop critical backend infrastructure that supports millions of global users and processes large transaction volumes.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with engineers, product managers, and designers to bring embedded finance products from concept through release.
• Analyze customer challenges deeply to craft user-centric solutions with thoughtful product insight.
• Utilize data-driven metrics to assess product impact and identify opportunities for continuous improvement.

Candidate Profile

• Minimum 8 years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in Java and Spring Boot development.
• Expertise in creating appropriate levels of abstraction to balance system flexibility and simplicity.
• Strong communication skills for conveying technical concepts effectively to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to make pragmatic decisions regarding performance optimization versus development velocity based on business priorities.
• Experience working in cross-disciplinary teams including product, design, compliance, and sales functions.
• Demonstrated capability in designing for scalability, maintainability, and operational excellence in production environments.
• Leadership experience driving multi-team technical initiatives with measurable impact at the business or technical level.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in fintech, payments, or other regulated industries.
• Experience optimizing systems to meet high throughput (100k+ queries per second) and stringent latency SLAs.
• Expertise in multi-tenant SaaS architectures or platform engineering.
• Proficiency with PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, and cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Knowledge of OAuth2.0, API design principles, and developer documentation standards.
• Familiarity with cross-region deployments and data residency compliance requirements.
• Experience with solutions engineering or customer-facing technical roles.

Why Join Airwallex

• Opportunity to contribute to a pioneering platform transforming global financial services.
• Access to professional growth and learning at a fast-moving innovative technology company.
• Collaborate with passionate, high-caliber colleagues driven to build exceptional products.

Applicant Protection and Integrity

Airwallex strictly safeguards applicant security against fraud and does not solicit sensitive information or payments during application or interview stages. Official communications only come from @airwallex.com addresses. The company does not accept unsolicited recruiter submissions and only pays recruitment fees through formal agreements.

Equal Opportunity Statement

Committed to diversity and inclusion, Airwallex evaluates all candidates based on merit and qualifications without discrimination based on legally protected status. Accommodations are available for disabilities or special needs upon request.

Compensation

The salary range for this position is SGD 240,000 to SGD 300,000 annually.