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Airwallex is a unified payments and financial platform serving over 250,000 global businesses including Brex, Navan, Qantas, and SHEIN. The company operates across 27 offices worldwide with 2,300+ employees and is valued at $11 billion, backed by leading investors including Sequoia, Visa, Mastercard, and T. Rowe Price.
The Payments Team is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to define technical direction and lead complex architecture decisions for the payment acceptance platform. This role goes beyond feature delivery to drive business outcomes through highly reliable, high-volume distributed systems.
Key responsibilities include:
- Leading architecture and evolution of next-generation Payment Acceptance infrastructure
- Designing and building scalable backend services, REST APIs, event-driven systems, and microservices components
- Driving complex initiatives across payment gateways, acquiring, issuing, card networks, and local payment methods
- Partnering with product, business, infrastructure, and external teams to translate merchant needs into technical solutions
- Conducting architectural reviews, addressing technical debt, and improving system reliability and scalability
- Raising engineering standards through strong design practices, code quality, testing, observability, and mentorship
Required qualifications:
- 10+ years of software engineering experience with Staff-level technical leadership or equivalent ownership of complex backend systems
- Strong experience designing and operating high-volume distributed systems in payments, fintech, commerce, or financial infrastructure
- Recent hands-on experience with Java or Kotlin and Spring/Spring Boot
- Expertise building REST APIs, backend microservices, Kafka-based event streams, and distributed data stores (Cassandra, Hazelcast, Oracle Coherence)
- Cloud platform experience (GCP or AWS), Docker, and Kubernetes
- Strong familiarity with observability tools (New Relic, StatsD, ELK, Datadog, Prometheus)
- Proven ability to lead projects from concept to production with focus on quality and reliability
- Excellent communication and cross-functional influence skills
Preferred: payment gateway/acquiring/issuing platform experience, card network integration (Visa, Mastercard), local payment methods (iDEAL, Klarna, Trustly), knowledge of authorization/capture/refunds/settlement/compliance workflows, and experience mentoring senior engineers.
