Staff Mobile Engineer, Foundation

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 Staff Mobile Engineer on the Mobile Foundations team, you’ll lead the technical direction of Airwallex’s native mobile platform across iOS and Android. You’ll shape the architecture, shared libraries, and tooling that help product squads ship faster, more reliably, and with a consistent user experience. - Define and evolve the shared mobile architecture across navigation, state management, networking, offline strategies, error handling, modularisation, and boundaries between platform foundations and product features. - Own critical mobile platform capabilities, including design system components, analytics, feature flags, experimentation, authentication, payments, and observability, making them stable, well-documented, and easy for product teams to adopt. - Improve mobile application security, reliability, performance, and observability through anti-tampering measures, certificate pinning, security best practices, crash reporting, logging, metrics, and tracing. - Define and track platform-level measures such as crash-free sessions, ANRs, app start-up time, bundle size, and network performance, using data to guide priorities with product teams. - Own and continuously improve mobile CI/CD pipelines and release workflows across iOS and Android, reducing build times, test flakiness, and friction in shipping new versions. - Drive cross-squad technical initiatives from problem definition through rollout and adoption, aligning engineering, product, design, and platform stakeholders around technical direction and trade-offs. - Raise the bar for mobile engineering through hands-on technical leadership, design reviews, mentoring, documentation, automation, best practices, hiring, and community building. This is a hybrid role based in San Francisco — you’ll be in the office on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR ESSENTIALS - 8–10+ years of experience building native mobile applications on iOS or Android, including at least 3+ years operating at a Senior or Staff level. - Deep expertise in one native mobile platform: Swift, SwiftUI, Combine, and async/await on iOS, or Kotlin, AndroidX, Jetpack, Coroutines, and Hilt on Android, with commercial knowledge of both platforms. - A proven track record of leading cross-team technical initiatives and evolving mobile architectures, such as modularisation, design systems, networking, or offline support. - Strong focus on code quality and reliability, including designing for testability and maintainability and writing high-quality automated tests. - Experience owning and improving mobile CI/CD pipelines, including build optimisation, test stability, and release workflows using tools such as GitHub Actions or Bitrise. - Experience driving mobile application security, performance, reliability, observability, or release engineering. - Demonstrated ability to influence without authority, align engineers, product managers, and designers around technical direction, and make pragmatic trade-offs. - Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. PREFERRED - Experience defining and driving a mobile platform roadmap while balancing foundational work with product delivery needs. - Prior ownership of shared mobile libraries or frameworks used by multiple product teams at scale. - Hands-on experience with mobile design systems and component libraries. - Experience with mobile analytics, experimentation, and feature flagging. - Experience with observability tooling such as Crashlytics, Sentry, or logging and metrics platforms. - Experience in payments, fintech, or B2B SaaS, especially in environments where reliability, security, and regulatory requirements are critical. - Experience mentoring senior engineers and contributing to hiring and growing mobile engineering teams. - Contributions to the mobile community through open source, talks, blog posts, or thought leadership in mobile architecture and foundations. 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 operating across time zones with a globally distributed team, including colleagues based in APAC and EMEA. - You value in-person collaboration and are happy being in the office five days a week. - You know when to align and when to just decide. Collaboration isn't a way to avoid accountability. LEARN MORE ABOUT YOUR TEAM The Mobile Foundations team sits at the core of Airwallex’s mobile stack. We build and evolve the shared architecture, libraries, and tooling that power our fully native iOS and Android apps. Our apps help businesses manage global B2B payments, submit and approve expenses, and control both virtual and physical Airwallex cards—complete with seamless Apple Pay and Google Pay integration. On iOS, we work with Swift, SwiftUI, Combine, and async/awa