Staff Backend Engineer, Issuing Platform

ABOUT AIRWALLEX Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. More than 676,000 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 2,300 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 https://www.airwallex.com/en-us/operating-principles to see it in full.   ABOUT THE TEAM The issuing engineering team at Airwallex builds and operates core systems for card issuing, transaction processing, and settlement at global scale. The team owns mission-critical platforms that underpin Airwallex’s issuing products, with a strong focus on reliability, scalability, and compliance. Key areas of ownership include: - Cards: Customer-facing and internal systems for card lifecycle management, controls, and configuration. - Transactions: A global, high-throughput transaction processing platform designed for low latency, high availability, and resiliency. - Settlement: Clearance, settlement, and dispute workflows that ensure financial accuracy and scheme compliance. WHAT YOU’LL DO As a staff software engineer, you are a senior individual contributor responsible for designing, building, and evolving the most technically complex parts of the issuing platform. While you do not have direct reports, your impact comes from deep technical ownership, architectural leadership, and raising the engineering bar across teams through design, mentorship, and example. This role is based in Singapore. RESPONSIBILITIES: Technical ownership and execution - Design, build, and operate highly reliable, scalable systems that powers real-time card transactions - Take end-to-end ownership of complex problem spaces, from system design through production rollout and long-term evolution. Architecture and system design - Lead the design of distributed, event-driven systems with strong guarantees around correctness, performance, and resiliency. - Drive architectural improvements that reduce complexity, improve operability, and enable future product growth. Engineering excellence - Set a high bar for code quality, testing, observability, and operational readiness. - Identify and remove technical bottlenecks that slow down teams or introduce systemic risk. Cross-team technical leadership - Influence technical direction across multiple teams through design reviews, RFCs, and hands-on collaboration. - Mentor senior engineers and help shape engineering best practices without formal people management responsibilities. Platform and infrastructure evolution - Contribute to the evolution of core infrastructure and shared platform capabilities to improve developer productivity and system reliability. - Evaluate new technologies pragmatically and guide their adoption where they deliver clear value. WHO YOU ARE We are looking for senior engineers with deep technical expertise and a strong track record of impact as an individual contributor. MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS: - 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with sustained impact as a senior or staff-level individual contributor. - Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field. - Strong proficiency in backend development using languages such as Java, Kotlin, Go, or Python. - Deep experience designing and delivering large-scale, distributed systems in production. - Strong computer science fundamentals and solid understanding of object-oriented design. - Hands-on experience with event-driven and streaming architectures, for example Kafka. - Proven experience designing and operating RESTful APIs at scale. - Experience with domain-driven design and event-driven architectures. - Cloud experience with GCP (preferred) or AWS, including Docker and Kubernetes. - Familiarity with observability tooling such as Splunk, Grafana, and Prometheus. - Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and influence technical direction through design and execution rather than authority. PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS: - Experience in fintech, payments, or other regulated financial domains. - Deep experience with JVM-based ecosystems, including Java or Kotlin with Spring or Spring Boot. 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 http://airwallex.com email address. Please apply only through careers.airwallex.com http://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.