Senior Software Engineer - Database

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 Airwallex's Database team sits within the Infrastructure division and is responsible for the reliability, performance, security, and automation of Airwallex's database infrastructure — primarily Postgres (Google CloudSQL), Redis (Google Memorystore), Clickhouse and many more. The team's mission is to make databases invisible: product engineers should be able to provision, scale, and operate databases safely without needing to become database experts themselves. Today the team has 4 engineers across Singapore and China. We are expanding to Seattle to build a truly global team and to tackle the next generation of database automation — including AI-powered database operations, self-service platforms, and unified observability. You will join a team that values engineering rigor, automation-first thinking, and a bias toward building tools over performing manual toil. This hybrid role is based in Seattle, WA. What you'll do As a Senior Software Engineer on the Database SRE team, you will design and build the platforms, automation, and AI-driven tooling that power Airwallex's database infrastructure. This is not a traditional DBA role — you are an engineer who builds systems that automate database operations at scale. You'll work across Postgres (CloudSQL) and Redis (Memorystore) on GCP, tackling challenges at the intersection of database reliability engineering, platform automation, and AI. Your work will directly impact the availability, performance, and security of the data layer that underpins Airwallex's global payments platform. Responsibilities: - Build a unified database observability platform: Design and implement an "eagle-eye" view across all database instances, providing real-time visibility into availability, security posture, reliability metrics, and latency — enabling proactive issue detection before incidents occur. - Build MCP (Model Context Protocol) for safe AI agent access: Design and implement secure interfaces that allow AI agents to safely query and interact with production databases, enabling the next generation of AI-powered internal tooling while maintaining strict security and access control. - Build an Agentic AI DBA: Develop AI-powered automation that handles routine DBA tasks — performance tuning, capacity planning, schema review, incident triage, and remediation — reducing manual toil and enabling the team to scale operations without scaling headcount. - Build self-service database platform: Create tooling that enables product engineering teams to provision, configure, scale, and manage Postgres and Redis instances through self-service workflows, with built-in guardrails for security, compliance, and best practices. - Drive database reliability and operational excellence: Establish and enforce database best practices across the organization — connection pooling, query optimization, backup/restore strategies, failover procedures, and change management. Participate in on-call rotations for database incidents. - Collaborate with engineering teams: Partner with product engineers to diagnose database performance issues, review schema designs, and provide guidance on data modeling and access patterns for Postgres and Redis. Who you are We're looking for people who meet the minimum requirements for this role. The preferred qualifications are great to have, but are not mandatory: - 5+ years of professional software engineering experience with strong proficiency in backend languages such as Python, Go, Java, or Kotlin. - Deep experience with PostgreSQL — performance tuning, query optimization, replication, backup/recovery, schema design, and operational best practices. - Experience with Redis — data modeling, clustering, persistence strategies, and operational management. - Infrastructure and cloud expertise: Hands-on experience with GCP (or equivalent cloud provider), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), Kubernetes, and Docker. - Demonstrated track record of building automation, tooling, or platforms that replaced manual operational work — not just operating databases, but engineering solutions that make operations scalable. - Strong system design skills, with the ability to architect reliable, scalable infrastructure services. Preferred qualifications: - Experience with Google CloudSQL and/or Google Memorystore specifically. - Experience building internal developer platforms, database-as-a-service systems, or self-service infrastructure tooling. - Experience with AI/ML technologies, LLM integration, or building AI-powered automation — particularly applied to infrastructure or operations use cases. - Familiarity with MCP (Model Context Protocol) or similar patterns for safe programmatic access to production systems. - Experience with observability tools (Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog) and building monitoring/alerting systems for database infrastructure. - Experience in fintech, payments, or other regulated industries where data integrity, security, and compliance are critical. 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.