Senior Software Engineer - Database

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 a Senior Software Engineer on the Database SRE team, you’ll design and build the platforms, automation, and AI-driven tooling that power Airwallex’s database infrastructure. You’ll work across PostgreSQL, Google CloudSQL, Redis, Google Memorystore, and GCP to solve problems at the intersection of database reliability engineering, platform automation, and AI. Your work will directly improve the availability, performance, security, and operational scalability of the data layer supporting Airwallex’s global payments platform. - Build a unified database observability platform that provides real-time visibility into availability, security posture, reliability metrics, and latency across database instances. - Design secure MCP (Model Context Protocol) interfaces that enable AI agents to query and interact with production databases while maintaining strict access controls. - Develop an agentic AI DBA to automate performance tuning, capacity planning, schema review, incident triage, and remediation. - Create self-service workflows that allow product engineering teams to provision, configure, scale, and manage PostgreSQL and Redis instances with built-in security, compliance, and reliability guardrails. - Establish database reliability practices across connection pooling, query optimization, backup and recovery, failover, and change management, and participate in on-call rotations for database incidents. - Partner with product engineers to diagnose performance issues, review schema designs, and improve data modelling and access patterns. You’ll be based in Seattle and work from the office three days a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR ESSENTIALS - 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with strong proficiency in a backend language such as Python, Go, Java, or Kotlin. - Deep experience with PostgreSQL, including performance tuning, query optimization, replication, backup and recovery, schema design, and operational best practices. - Experience with Redis, including data modelling, clustering, persistence strategies, and operational management. - Hands-on experience with GCP or an equivalent cloud provider, infrastructure as code such as Terraform, Kubernetes, and Docker. - A track record of building automation, tooling, or platforms that replace manual operational work and make database operations scalable. - Strong system design skills, with the ability to architect reliable and scalable infrastructure services. PREFERRED - Experience with Google CloudSQL and/or Google Memorystore. - Experience building internal developer platforms, database-as-a-service systems, or self-service infrastructure tooling. - Experience with AI/ML technologies, LLM integration, or AI-powered automation, particularly for infrastructure or operations use cases. - Familiarity with MCP or similar patterns for safe programmatic access to production systems. - Experience with observability tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, or Datadog, and with building monitoring and alerting systems for database infrastructure. - Experience in fintech, payments, or another regulated industry where data integrity, security, and compliance are critical. 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 simplify complexity rather than hiding behind it. - You value in-person collaboration and are happy being in the office three days a week. 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.a