Engineering Director, Payments Platform

📋 Job Overview

Engineering Director, Payments Platform at Airwallex in San Francisco. This is a Full-time role in the Engineering department. The expected base pay range is $237K – $407K, with equity and bonus offerings.

🏢 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 250,000 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. Proudly founded in Melbourne, we have a team of over 2,300 of the brightest and most innovative people in tech across 27 offices around the globe. Valued at US$11 billion and backed by world-leading investors including T. Rowe Price, Visa, Mastercard, Robinhood Ventures, Sequoia, Salesforce Ventures, DST Global, and Lone Pine Capital, Airwallex is leading the charge in building the global payments and financial platform of the future. If you’re ready to do the most ambitious work of your career, join us.

🎯 The Role

Payments Platform at Airwallex is where global payment complexity is turned into infrastructure that helps businesses accept and move money more simply. We build the platform behind how payments are accepted and processed across markets, helping businesses embed payments into their workflows, improve conversion, and operate with less friction. The work supports a core growth lever for Airwallex: payment experiences that are reliable, scalable, and easy to use. What makes this team distinct is the challenge at the heart of it: balancing performance, reliability, local complexity, and commercial outcomes in the same system. Small improvements can materially affect customer experience and conversion, while failures are immediately visible. You'll do well here if you enjoy product infrastructure with clear business impact. This team suits engineers who are thoughtful, pragmatic, and motivated by making complex problems feel simple to customers. If you want to build the platform that makes payments work seamlessly for businesses around the world, this is the team at the center of that mission.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Define and execute the Payments Platform vision: Own the end-to-end strategy, architecture, and roadmap for Airwallex's Payments Platform — covering payment processing, routing, settlement, reconciliation, and partner integrations — ensuring it scales reliably across global markets.
• Lead and grow a world-class engineering organization: Manage, coach, and develop Engineering Managers and senior technical talent across multiple squads, building a culture of ownership, technical excellence, and continuous improvement while driving sustainable hiring and team growth.
• Drive technical architecture and platform excellence: Provide architectural direction for high-volume, mission-critical payment systems, setting high standards for reliability, observability, security, scalability, and developer productivity across the platform.
• Deliver with speed and operational rigor: Set clear OKRs, manage execution across multiple concurrent initiatives, and hold teams accountable for high-quality outcomes — balancing short-term delivery with long-term platform investments and operational health.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, design, and other engineering teams to ensure seamless integration and alignment with business objectives.

🎁 Benefits

Airwallex promotes fair compensation practices in accordance with applicable national, federal, state, and local law. These expected base pay ranges are based on information at the time this post was generated and represent the company’s good faith minimum and maximum ranges for this role at the time of posting. The actual compensation offered to a candidate will be dependent upon multiple factors, including but not limited to relevant experience, skills and other qualifications, geographic location as noted, internal equity, and other external market factors. Certain roles may be eligible for other compensation including, but not limited to, annual bonuses, commissions, RSUs, or other forms of compensation in addition to the established salary range. Benefits vary by country and employment type in accordance with local statutory requirements. All employees receive at least the statutory minimum for paid annual leave and public holidays, with many of our locations offering additional company-provided vacation days. For example, for US-based employees, they are eligible to participate in medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan, short-term and long-term disability, basic life insurance, and well-being benefits. US-based employees also receive 20 paid days of vacation and 12 paid days of company holidays in a calendar year.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

Further details about our compensation and benefits package are available upon request by contacting our Talent Acquisition team.