Staff Software Engineer, Productivity

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 Airwallex’s global engineering organization relies on strong developer platforms to move quickly, ship high-quality software, and operate efficiently. You’ll lead the technical strategy and delivery of the productivity systems that make that possible. - Lead the technical strategy and delivery of developer productivity platforms that help Airwallex’s global engineering organization move faster, ship higher-quality software, and operate more efficiently. - Identify productivity bottlenecks with feature teams, then design and build scalable solutions across developer tooling, CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, observability, messaging, and workflow automation. - Define and drive an AI-powered developer productivity strategy, evaluating and deploying solutions such as AI-assisted code review, automated test generation, intelligent build optimization, and agent-based root-cause analysis. - Set the technical bar across the Infrastructure & Productivity domain by shaping architecture, reviewing RFCs, establishing engineering practices, mentoring engineers, and balancing performance, scalability, maintainability, and cost. - Partner with engineers, SREs, and stakeholders across Airwallex to measure and improve developer experience through signals such as build times, deployment frequency, deployment reliability, and developer satisfaction. You'll work from our Seattle office three days a week. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR ESSENTIALS - 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including experience building or maintaining CI/CD pipelines, developer tooling, or platform infrastructure at scale. - Strong proficiency in a backend programming language such as Python, Java, Go, Kotlin, Rust, or Node.js, along with experience using the relevant frameworks. - Experience designing and developing large-scale distributed systems with high concurrency, high load, and high availability requirements. - Strong system design skills and experience defining technical strategy for a team or domain, including architectural decisions that balance performance, scalability, maintainability, and cost. - Hands-on experience with cloud services such as AWS, GCP, or Aliyun, and infrastructure management tools such as Terraform, Kubernetes, and Docker. - Experience providing technical leadership across teams, making architectural decisions, reviewing designs or RFCs, mentoring engineers, and raising engineering quality standards. - Experience with server technologies and the ability to optimise service response and data queries while addressing high-concurrency and high-availability challenges. - Experience partnering with engineering teams and stakeholders to understand workflows, identify productivity needs, and deliver reliable platform solutions. PREFERRED - Experience using AI, machine learning, or LLM integrations to improve developer workflows, automate code review, generate tests, or accelerate engineering productivity. - Familiarity with AI-powered development tools such as Cursor or Copilot, and a perspective on how AI will transform developer productivity engineering. - Experience with observability and monitoring tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, or the ELK stack. - Experience operating production infrastructure with strong incident-response practices. - Solid understanding of messaging systems such as Kafka, data streaming, container orchestration, and microservices architecture. - Experience in platform engineering or developer experience at a technology or fintech company. - A data-driven approach to measuring and improving developer productivity, including build times, deployment frequency, DORA metrics, or developer NPS. - Experience with build systems such as Bazel or Gradle, or internal developer portals. - A track record of moving quickly and developing solutions in dynamic, collaborative, and ambiguous environments while working with diverse decision-makers. YOU'LL THRIVE HERE IF - You're comfortable owning the roadmap yourself. - You own the outcome and you don't wait for permission to fix what's broken. - 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 know when to align and when to just decide. Collaboration isn't a way to avoid accountability. 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