Senior Database Administrator (DBA), Infra

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 You’ll own the reliability, security, and day-to-day operation of Airwallex’s Korean production database environment supporting cross-border payment products. You’ll operate and optimise PostgreSQL, Redis, and Redis Cluster environments across Google Cloud, with a secondary AWS footprint, while partnering with local product, engineering, security, and compliance teams and our global DBA team. - Own high availability, replication, failover, backups, and disaster recovery for production database environments. - Drive compliance with Korean data residency and security requirements across backups, replicas, and snapshots. - Build automation for provisioning, configuration, access management, and operational processes using scripts, software, and infrastructure-as-code. - Improve database reliability and performance through monitoring, alerting, schema standards, indexing, query optimisation, and incident troubleshooting. - Strengthen privileged access, change approval, compliance evidence, and operational documentation for Korean production databases. - Partner with local and global teams to improve database security, operational efficiency, and on-call readiness. This role is based in Seoul, South Korea. Address: Units 1006, Partners Tower, 83 Gasan digital 1-ro, Geumcheon-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea, 08589 서울 금천구 가산디지털1로 83, 1006 호(가산동, 파트너스타워) WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR ESSENTIALS - 4+ years of experience administering production relational databases and live transactional workloads. - Strong PostgreSQL experience, including high availability, replication, and cluster management. - Experience with Patroni, pgpool-II, PgBouncer, or similar failover and connection-pooling tools. - Strong Redis and Redis Cluster administration experience. - Experience operating databases on a major public cloud, preferably Google Cloud. - Proficiency in Linux, shell scripting, and at least one programming language. - Strong analytical, communication, and problem-solving skills. - Strong ownership and documentation practices. - Business-level English and professional Korean. PREFERRED - Experience with distributed databases, Kafka, Elasticsearch, or ClickHouse. - Experience with Terraform, Ansible, or similar infrastructure-as-code tools. - Experience with database containerisation or Kubernetes. - Experience in a Korean bank, payments company, or licensed fintech. - Familiarity with Korean data residency, network separation, access control, or audit requirements. - Experience supporting regulatory examinations or external audits. - Experience building or taking ownership of a database environment from the ground up. YOU'LL THRIVE HERE IF - You own the outcome and you don't wait for permission to fix what's broken. - You hold yourself to a high standard even when no one is watching. Quality and accountability aren't external expectations, they're internal ones. - You're comfortable with ambiguity. Give you a problem, not a prescription, and you'll run with it. - You say what you mean. You're direct, but you lead with respect. - You simplify complexity rather than hiding behind it. LEARN MORE ABOUT YOUR TEAM The Infrastructure & Productivity team at Airwallex builds the technical foundation that allows our global engineering organization to scale. Our customers are our fellow engineers, and our mission is to make their daily work faster, safer, and more effective by managing the core platforms everyone relies on, from Kubernetes and Kafka to CI/CD pipelines and observability systems. The real challenge lies in keeping these global systems highly reliable and secure while simultaneously optimizing cloud costs, automating manual support, and driving standardization without slowing down product delivery. We operate under the philosophy that best practices should be the path of least resistance, not a forced mandate. If you're a systems thinker who wants to work close to the core of the company and directly shape how we build, deploy, and scale software worldwide, this is where that work happens. 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 a