Head of Engineering, Payments Platform

📋 Job Overview

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.

🏢 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 to see it in full.

🎯 The Role

Payments Platform turns global payment complexity into infrastructure that helps businesses accept and process money more simply. As Engineering Director, you'll combine people leadership, technical direction, and delivery ownership to build and operate critical components of the platform.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end strategy, architecture, and roadmap for Airwallex's Payments Platform, covering payment processing, routing, settlement, reconciliation, and partner integrations across global markets.
• Lead and grow a high-performing engineering organisation by managing and developing Engineering Managers and senior technical talent across multiple squads, while building a culture of ownership, technical excellence, and continuous improvement.
• Provide architectural direction for high-volume, mission-critical payment systems, setting high standards for reliability, observability, security, scalability, and developer productivity.
• Drive execution across multiple concurrent initiatives, balancing short-term delivery with long-term platform investments and operational health.
• Partner with Product, Commercial, Risk, Compliance, and regional engineering leaders to ensure platform capabilities support Airwallex's growth, customer experience, and regulatory requirements.

📌 Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with 5+ years in engineering leadership roles.
• Demonstrated experience in people management, including managing Engineering Managers or Engineering Leads, with a track record of building and scaling high-performing teams.
• Strong product thinking and the ability to partner closely with Product Management to define roadmaps, prioritise delivery, and drive business outcomes.
• Deep technical fluency in software architecture and system design, with experience guiding architectural decisions for large-scale, complex distributed systems.
• Proven ability to operate in fast-paced, high-growth environments where incremental improvement, ownership, and speed of execution are valued.
• Experience in fintech, financial services, payments, or a similarly regulated industry where correctness and data integrity are critical.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• 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 making decisions with incomplete information and moving quickly anyway.
• You enjoy working closely with people across multiple countries and time zones as part of one connected, global team, including flexing your hours occasionally to make that connection work.
• You have experience at a fintech, payments company, or other highly regulated business.

🎁 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

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 email address. Please apply only through careers.airwallex.com or our official LinkedIn page. Airwallex does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firms/recruiters. Airwallex will not pay any fees to search firms/recruiters.