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Airwallex is an AI-native financial operating system serving over 676,000 businesses globally, including McLaren Racing, Qantas, SHEIN, and TikTok. The company operates as the regulated backbone for global payments, holding 85+ licenses across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. With 2,300+ employees across 27 offices and co-headquarters in San Francisco and Singapore, Airwallex builds infrastructure for real-time, intelligent commerce.
The Data Platform team designs intelligent, autonomous systems that eliminate financial operations for companies globally—automating bookkeeping, reconciliation, tax, payroll, forecasting, and document understanding. The team combines deep research expertise with proven industry experience, operating with high standards and shipping exceptional work quickly.
As Senior Manager of Data Platform Engineering, you will lead the team responsible for the data backbone of Airwallex's financial systems. You'll set technical direction for high-volume financial data ingestion, the Databricks lakehouse, data orchestration, canonical financial models, and infrastructure ensuring reliability, scalability, and increasingly real-time processing.
Key responsibilities include:
- Leading and growing a high-performing data platform engineering team with mentorship and career development
- Setting technical strategy for high-volume financial data ingestion across payment processors, banks, billing systems, and ERP/GL platforms with strong correctness and recovery guarantees
- Evolving the Databricks lakehouse using Spark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, dbt, Python, and SQL for scale, performance, and cost optimization
- Defining standards for data contracts, schema evolution, drift detection, data quality, and canonical financial models
- Driving evolution from batch toward near-real-time processing using Kafka, CDC, micro-batching, and Dagster orchestration
- Owning architecture of canonical financial models that transform complex source data into consistent financial objects powering the accounting engine
- Partnering with infrastructure and platform teams on observability, alerting, incident response, and operational readiness
- Guiding infrastructure strategy across GCP, Terraform, Kubernetes/GKE, Helm, GitOps, and CI/CD
- Leading migrations from legacy pipelines to the lakehouse with rigorous validation and rollback strategies
- Driving performance and cost optimization across PostgreSQL, Databricks, and large-scale data workloads
- Translating business needs into scalable data platform capabilities through partnership with product, accounting, ML, and platform leadership
- Setting technical direction through architecture reviews, design documents, and long-term platform roadmaps
- Championing AI-assisted engineering practices that improve team velocity while maintaining high standards
Requirements:
- 8+ years of experience in data platform, backend, or infrastructure engineering, including significant experience leading engineering teams
- Proven experience managing and developing senior engineers and technical leads; ability to build strong, autonomous teams
- Deep expertise in data platforms, distributed systems, data modeling, and production data pipelines
- Strong experience with Python and SQL, plus hands-on experience with Spark, Databricks, Delta Lake, dbt, and modern lakehouse architectures
- Experience building reliable ingestion systems with large-scale backfills, incremental processing, checkpointing, rate-limit handling, idempotency, and failure recovery
- Strong understanding of streaming and event-driven architectures, including Kafka, CDC, and micro-batching
- Experience with data orchestration platforms such as Dagster, designing for freshness, partitioning, and incremental computation
- Experience optimizing PostgreSQL and analytical workloads for performance and cost
- Experience operating production infrastructure on GCP with familiarity with Terraform, Kubernetes/GKE, Helm, GitOps, and CI/CD
- Strong understanding of observability, reliability engineering, and production operations
- Excellent technical communication skills with ability to influence architecture and engineering decisions across teams
- Experience leading complex technical migrations and balancing long-term platform strategy with near-term business priorities
- Passion for building teams and infrastructure that power reliable, scalable, mission-critical financial systems
