Backend Engineer, Issuing Platform

About Airwallex

Airwallex is the only unified payments and financial platform for global businesses. Powered by our unique combination of proprietary infrastructure and software, we empower over 200,000 businesses worldwide – including Brex, Rippling, Navan, Qantas, SHEIN and many more – with fully integrated solutions to manage everything from business accounts, payments, spend management and treasury, to embedded finance at a global scale.

The issuing engineering team at Airwallex builds and operates core systems for card issuing, transaction processing, and settlement at global scale. The team owns mission‑critical platforms that underpin Airwallex’s issuing products, with a strong focus on reliability, scalability, and compliance.

• Cards:
  Customer‑facing and internal systems for card lifecycle management, controls, and configuration.
• Transactions: A global, high‑throughput transaction processing platform designed for low latency, high availability, and resiliency.
• Settlement:
  Clearance, settlement, and dispute workflows that ensure financial accuracy and scheme compliance.

As a staff software engineer, you are a senior individual contributor responsible for designing, building, and evolving the most technically complex parts of the issuing platform. While you do not have direct reports, your impact comes from deep technical ownership, architectural leadership, and raising the engineering bar across teams through design, mentorship, and example. This role is based in Singapore.

• Design, build, and operate highly reliable, scalable systems that power real‑time card transactions.
• Take end‑to‑end ownership of complex problem spaces, from system design through production rollout and long‑term evolution.

• Lead the design of distributed, event‑driven systems with strong guarantees around correctness, performance, and resiliency.
• Drive architectural improvements that reduce complexity, improve operability, and enable future product growth.

• Set a high bar for code quality, testing, observability, and operational readiness.
• Identify and remove technical bottlenecks that slow down teams or introduce systemic risk.

• Influence technical direction across multiple teams through design reviews, RFCs, and hands‑on collaboration.
• Mentor senior engineers and help shape engineering best practices without formal people management responsibilities.

• Contribute to the evolution of core infrastructure and shared platform capabilities to improve developer productivity and system reliability.
• Evaluate new technologies pragmatically and guide their adoption where they deliver clear value.

We are looking for senior engineers with deep technical expertise and a strong track record of impact as an individual contributor.

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with sustained impact as a senior or staff‑level individual contributor.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• Strong proficiency in backend development using languages such as Java, Kotlin, Go, or Python.
• Deep experience designing and delivering large‑scale, distributed systems in production.
• Strong computer science fundamentals and solid understanding of object‑oriented design.
• Hands‑on experience with event‑driven and streaming architectures, for example Kafka.
• Proven experience designing and operating RESTful APIs at scale.
• Experience with domain‑driven design and event‑driven architectures.
• Cloud experience with GCP (preferred) or AWS, including Docker and Kubernetes.
• Familiarity with…