Engineering Director, Agentic AI Data Platform

The posting, as Airwallex wrote it

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 https://www.airwallex.com/en-us/operating-principles to see it in full.

HOW YOU'LL MAKE IMPACT

As Director of Data Platform Engineering, you'll lead the team responsible for the data backbone of our financial systems. You'll set the technical direction for high-volume financial data ingestion, our Databricks lakehouse, data orchestration, canonical financial models, and the infrastructure that makes our data platform reliable, scalable, and increasingly real-time.

• Lead and grow a high-performing data platform engineering team, providing technical direction, mentorship, career development, and clear ownership.
• Set the technical strategy for high-volume financial data ingestion across payment processors, banks, billing systems, and ERP/GL platforms, with strong guarantees around correctness, replayability, and recovery.
• Lead the evolution of our Databricks lakehouse using Spark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, dbt, Python, and SQL, optimising for scale, performance, reliability, and cost.
• Define standards for data contracts, schema evolution, drift detection, data quality, and canonical financial models.
• Evolve the platform from batch toward near-real-time processing using Kafka, CDC, micro-batching, incremental processing, and Dagster orchestration.
• Own the architecture of canonical financial models that transform complex source data into consistent financial objects and relationships powering our accounting engine.
• Partner with infrastructure and platform teams to build reliable production foundations across observability, alerting, incident response, recovery, and operational readiness.
• Guide infrastructure strategy across GCP, Terraform, Kubernetes/GKE, Helm, GitOps, and CI/CD.
• Lead migrations from legacy pipelines to the lakehouse, with rigorous parity validation, staged rollouts, and clear rollback strategies.
• Drive performance and cost optimisation across PostgreSQL, Databricks, and large-scale data workloads.
• Partner with product, accounting, ML, and pla

[…]
k us over both the legacy tools they've outgrown and the AI wrappers they don't trust. And bookkeeping is just the start: we're building toward a full financial operating system for how companies account, plan, and operate. The team is small, elite, and builder-focused, led by operators with a track record of shipping AI products at scale. We sit inside Airwallex, which means startup speed with a scaled company's infrastructure, distribution, and capital behind us. You'll work directly from real customer pain, own outcomes end to end, and ship fast.

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.