Engineering Lead, Scale

Job description

About Airwallex

Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. More than 675,000 businesses, including McLaren Racing, Qantas, SHEIN, and TikTok, use us, directly or through our platform partners, to run their financial operations or build and monetize financial products of their own.

We started in Melbourne in 2015 to build the infrastructure global commerce runs on. We're the regulated backbone behind global payments: not by accident, but by design. A decade plus, 85+ licenses, and a financial infrastructure spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.

We're co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, with more than 2,700 people across 27 offices. We hire builders with founder-level energy, people who move fast with good judgment, dig in with real curiosity, and make calls from first principles rather than waiting to be told what to do. Read our operating principles to see it in full.

How you'll make impact

As an Engineering Lead, Scale, you’ll lead a team building critical platform capabilities for Airwallex’s embedded finance products. You’ll manage engineers directly and be accountable for team health, execution, and long-term technical quality, while staying technically credible and involved at an architectural level.

• Own technical direction for scalable, reliable backend systems and partner with senior engineers on architecture and design.
• Drive high standards for system design, code quality, testing, and operational excellence.
• Improve reliability, observability, security, and developer productivity across the team.
• Partner with product, design, compliance, sales, and engineering leaders to align execution with business priorities.
• Translate enterprise customer and commercial requirements into pragmatic technical solutions.
• Coach and grow engineers through feedback, performance management, and career development.

You’ll work from our London office three days a week.

What we're looking for

Essentials

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 1+ years in a people leadership role.
• Strong backend development experience with an object-oriented programming language.
• Proven experience designing and operating large-scale, distributed production systems.
• Strong system design and object-oriented design fundamentals.
• Ability to balance abstraction, simplicity, and speed in technical decision-making.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and lead technical execution.

Preferred

• Experience in fintech, payments, or other regulated domains.
• Experience with multi-tenant SaaS or platform architecture.
• Familiarity with PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, and cloud platforms such as AWS or GCP.
• Experience with API design, OAuth 2.0, or developer-facing platforms.
• Exposure to cross-region deployment, data residency, or customer-facing technical architecture.

You'll thrive here if

• You’re comfortable owning the roadmap yourself.
• You’re comfortable with ambiguity. Give you a problem, not a prescription, and you’ll run with it.
• You own the outcome and you don’t wait for permission to fix what’s broken.
• You connect dots across functions and hold the big picture without losing grip on the details.
• You simplify complexity rather than hiding behind it.

Learn more about your team

The Scale team builds the infrastructure that lets platforms embed Airwallex financial products at speed and with confidence. The team owns multi-tenant systems powering companies like Brex, Rippling, Navan, Qantas, and SHEIN. The engineering challenges are real: balancing tenant isolation with resource efficiency, low-latency performance with cross-data-center resilience, and immediate customer needs with long-term architectural extensibility.

Beyond infrastructure, the team owns cross-domain product features and designs enterprise integrations by translating customer business requirements into scalable technical solutions.

Applicant Safety Policy: Fraud and Third-Party Recruiters

To protect you from recruitment scams, please be aware that Airwallex will not ask for bank details, sensitive ID numbers (i.e. passport), or any form of payment during the application or interview process. All official communication will come from an @airwallex.com email address. Please apply only through careers.airwallex.com or our official LinkedIn page.

Airwallex does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firms/recruiters. Airwallex will not pay any fees to search firms/recruiters if a candidate is submitted by a search firm/recruiter unless an agreement has been entered into with respect to specific open position(s). Search firms/recruiters submitting resumes to Airwallex on an unsolicited basis shall be deemed to accept this condition, regardless of any other provision to the contrary.

Equal opportunity

Airwallex is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and anyone seeking employment at Airwallex is considered based on merit, qualifications, competence and talent. We don’t regard color, religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, ancestry, citizenship, sex, marital or family status, disability, gender, or any other legally protected status when making our hiring decisions. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.