# Engineering Director, Org & Identity **Company:** [Airwallex](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/airwallex) Lead the engineering strategy and execution for Airwallex's core identity and organization foundations as Engineering Director. This role spans building highly available, scalable, and secure distributed systems for user onboarding, authentication, access control, and organization modeling. You'll own technical direction, drive cross-functional partnerships with Product, Design, Risk, and Compliance, and build a high-performing engineering team in a fast-moving fintech environment serving 675,000+ businesses globally. **Role:** Engineering Manager **Seniority:** Director **Locations:** SG - Singapore **Salary:** 180000–280000 USD [Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/airwallex/8bb6719a-71ae-48fb-a007-01fd10776587) Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/airwallex/engineering-director-org-identity --- ## Responsibilities - Own Technical Direction and Strategy: Establish and execute the technical vision for identity and organization foundations, ensuring systems are highly available, scalable, and secure. Define architectural patterns, technology choices, and technical roadmap aligned with business objectives and platform evolution. - Translate Complex Requirements Into Engineering Priorities: Partner closely with Product, Design, Risk, Compliance, and Onboarding teams to understand ambiguous business, product, and security requirements. Convert complex organizational and identity needs into clear, prioritized engineering work that balances multiple constraints. - Build and Develop High-Performing Teams: Lead the hiring, coaching, and performance management of engineering team members. Drive organizational design that enables team growth, skill development, and operational excellence. Create a culture of excellence in architecture, delivery, and security. - Raise Engineering Excellence Standards: Establish and maintain high standards across architecture design, system delivery, operational reliability, and security practices. Mentor engineers on distributed systems design, security best practices, and operational responsibility. Drive continuous improvement in code quality and system observability. - Balance Competing Priorities and Trade-offs: Make informed decisions balancing delivery speed, system reliability, security posture, operational complexity, and long-term maintainability. Navigate competing stakeholder interests and communicate trade-offs clearly to technical and executive audiences. - Own Roadmap and Drive Execution: Take ownership of the team's roadmap without waiting for permission or external direction. Drive execution against ambitious goals, remove blockers, and ensure the team delivers reliable platform capabilities that serve all Airwallex products. - Ensure Cross-functional Collaboration: Influence and communicate effectively across technical and non-technical stakeholders at both technical and executive levels. Build strong partnerships with cross-functional teams, ensuring identity and organization foundations meet needs across the organization. ## Requirements ### education - {"name":"Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Related Field","description":"Formal education in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent field providing strong foundational knowledge in algorithms, data structures, and system design principles."} - {"name":"Advanced Degree or Equivalent Professional Development","description":"Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering Management, or related field, or equivalent professional certifications and self-directed learning demonstrating commitment to technical and leadership excellence."} ### technical - {"name":"Distributed Systems Design and Operations","description":"Deep technical expertise in designing, building, and operating highly available, scalable, and secure distributed systems. Experience with patterns for consistency, fault tolerance, observability, and capacity management."} - {"name":"Identity, Authentication, and Authorization Systems","description":"Strong background designing and operating identity platforms, authentication mechanisms (multi-factor, passwordless, OAuth, SAML), authorization systems (role-based access control, attribute-based access control), and account management systems."} - {"name":"Security Architecture and Best Practices","description":"Demonstrated expertise in security-first architecture, including threat modeling, cryptography, secrets management, security testing, compliance requirements (SOC2, ISO27001), and secure software development lifecycle practices."} - {"name":"Platform and Infrastructure Design","description":"Experience designing foundational platform capabilities that multiple products depend on, including API design, data modeling, versioning strategies, backward compatibility, and migration management."} - {"name":"Operational Excellence and Observability","description":"Expertise in building observable systems with comprehensive logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting. Experience in incident response, postmortem culture, and continuous operational improvement."} ### experience - {"name":"Leadership of Engineering Teams","description":"Significant experience (5+ years) leading engineering teams responsible for critical platform capabilities such as identity, authentication, authorization, account management, or other foundational infrastructure. Demonstrated track record building and scaling teams of 5-20+ engineers."} - {"name":"Technical Strategy and Roadmap Ownership","description":"Proven ability to set technical strategy at the team or org level, translate ambiguous requirements into clear priorities, and drive multi-quarter technical initiatives. Experience working with product and business stakeholders to align technical decisions with business outcomes."} - {"name":"Cross-functional Partnership","description":"Demonstrated success partnering with Product, Design, Risk, Compliance, Security, and other stakeholder groups. Experience navigating competing priorities and influencing without direct authority."} - {"name":"Financial Services or Regulated Industries","description":"Background in fintech, payments, banking, or other regulated industries. Experience with compliance requirements, security standards, audit processes, and working in compliance-sensitive environments."} - {"name":"Scale and High-volume Systems","description":"Experience building systems serving hundreds of thousands to millions of users or transactions. Understanding of performance optimization, capacity planning, and system scalability challenges at production scale."} ## Skills ### required - {"name":"System Design and Architecture","description":"Ability to design and architect highly available, scalable systems with clear thinking about trade-offs, capacity, fault tolerance, and evolution over time."} - {"name":"Technical Leadership","description":"Demonstrated ability to lead and mentor engineering teams, set technical direction, make architecture decisions, and raise engineering standards across a team."} - {"name":"Cross-functional Communication","description":"Strong communication skills to influence both technical engineers and non-technical stakeholders at executive levels. Ability to explain complex technical concepts to diverse audiences."} - {"name":"Strategic Thinking","description":"Capability to think strategically about platform foundations, balance short-term delivery with long-term maintainability, and connect decisions to business outcomes."} - {"name":"Identity and Security Fundamentals","description":"Solid understanding of identity concepts (authentication, authorization, account management), security principles, and how they apply to platform design."} - {"name":"Operational Excellence","description":"Understanding of operational reliability principles, observability, incident response, and systems thinking for running production systems at scale."} - {"name":"Judgment and Decision-making","description":"Sound judgment in making decisions with incomplete information, balancing competing priorities, and taking ownership of outcomes without requiring external validation."} ### preferred - {"name":"OAuth 2.0, OIDC, and Modern Authentication Protocols","description":"Experience implementing or operating modern authentication and authorization protocols, including OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWT, and passwordless authentication mechanisms."} - {"name":"Role-Based and Attribute-Based Access Control","description":"Experience designing and implementing RBAC or ABAC systems for managing fine-grained permissions and access control policies at scale."} - {"name":"Microservices and API Design","description":"Experience designing and operating microservices architectures with clear API contracts, versioning strategies, and deployment patterns supporting independent scaling and evolution."} - {"name":"Data Consistency and Event-Driven Architecture","description":"Expertise in distributed consistency patterns, eventual consistency models, event-driven architectures, and choreography vs orchestration patterns."} - {"name":"Cloud Platform Operations","description":"Deep experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) for deploying, monitoring, and scaling infrastructure supporting millions of transactions or users."} - {"name":"Compliance and Security Standards","description":"Familiarity with compliance frameworks (SOC2, ISO27001, GDPR, PCI-DSS), security standards, and audit processes relevant to financial services."} - {"name":"Identity Verification and KYC Systems","description":"Experience with identity verification, know-your-customer (KYC), and onboarding workflows common in fintech and regulated environments."} - {"name":"Incident Management and Postmortem Culture","description":"Track record building strong incident response processes, postmortem culture, and organizational learning from operational events."} ## Tech stack ### tools - {"name":"Kubernetes","description":"Container orchestration platform for deploying and managing distributed systems at scale, essential for modern cloud-native fintech infrastructure."} - {"name":"Docker","description":"Containerization technology for packaging and deploying services consistently across development, testing, and production environments."} - {"name":"Terraform","description":"Infrastructure-as-code tool for provisioning and managing cloud resources reproducibly and auditably."} - {"name":"Prometheus/Grafana","description":"Observability stack for metrics collection, visualization, and alerting critical for operating identity systems reliably."} - {"name":"ELK Stack/Datadog","description":"Centralized logging and monitoring platforms for aggregating logs, debugging production issues, and maintaining audit trails."} - {"name":"GitLab CI/GitHub Actions","description":"CI/CD platforms for automating testing, security scanning, and deployment processes with audit trail support."} ### others - {"name":"OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect","description":"Standard protocols for authentication and authorization, essential for building modern identity systems serving multiple applications."} - {"name":"SAML 2.0","description":"Enterprise authentication protocol for single sign-on and federating identity across enterprise customers and partners."} - {"name":"JWT and Cryptographic Signing","description":"JSON Web Token standards for stateless authentication and cryptographic verification of user identity and permissions."} - {"name":"Event-Driven Architecture","description":"Pattern for building loosely coupled systems using event streaming platforms like Kafka or Pub/Sub for reliable, auditable state management."} - {"name":"Service Mesh (Istio/Linkerd)","description":"Tools for managing inter-service communication, security policies, and observability in microservices environments."} ### databases - {"name":"PostgreSQL","description":"Mature, ACID-compliant relational database widely used in fintech for storing transactional data, user accounts, and compliance-critical information."} - {"name":"Redis","description":"In-memory cache and datastore for session management, rate limiting, and real-time data structures critical for identity systems."} - {"name":"MongoDB","description":"Document database for flexible schema storage and high-throughput applications, sometimes used for audit logs and flexible organizational data."} - {"name":"DynamoDB/Cassandra","description":"Distributed, highly available databases for massive scale and eventual consistency requirements in identity and audit log systems."} ### languages - {"name":"TypeScript/JavaScript","description":"Modern full-stack JavaScript ecosystem for building scalable backend and frontend systems. Commonly used in fintech for rapid development and strong typing capabilities."} - {"name":"Python","description":"Widely adopted for backend services, data processing, and scripting in fintech companies. Strong ecosystem for security and compliance tooling."} - {"name":"Go","description":"High-performance language suited for building distributed systems, microservices, and infrastructure tooling with strong concurrency models."} - {"name":"Java/Kotlin","description":"Enterprise-grade languages commonly used in financial services for building reliable, auditable systems with strong typing and performance."} ### frameworks - {"name":"Express.js/NestJS","description":"Popular Node.js frameworks for building scalable API servers and microservices with clear architectural patterns."} - {"name":"FastAPI/Django","description":"Python frameworks for rapid API development with built-in support for validation, security, and async operations."} - {"name":"Spring Boot","description":"Enterprise Java framework for building production-grade applications with comprehensive support for security, transactions, and cloud deployment."} - {"name":"gRPC","description":"High-performance RPC framework for inter-service communication in microservices architectures, particularly useful for identity services."} ## Benefits ### benefits - {"name":"Equity Participation","description":"Stock options aligned with company growth, offering long-term value creation opportunity as Airwallex scales from 2,300+ employees across 27 global offices."} - {"name":"Global Career Development","description":"Opportunity to lead critical platform foundations at a rapidly scaling fintech company serving 675,000+ businesses globally. Access to internal mobility across 27 offices and co-headquarters in San Francisco and Singapore."} - {"name":"Competitive Health and Wellness Benefits","description":"Comprehensive health insurance, wellness programs, and mental health support recognizing the demands of technical leadership in fast-moving fintech environments."} - {"name":"Flexible Work Arrangements","description":"Flexible location and schedule options supporting work-life balance while maintaining collaboration with distributed global teams across North America, Europe, Middle East, and Asia-Pacific."} - {"name":"Professional Development and Learning","description":"Investment in professional development, conference attendance, and continuous learning opportunities to stay current with identity, security, and distributed systems best practices."} - {"name":"Retirement Planning","description":"Structured retirement savings programs and financial planning support appropriate for director-level engineering roles."} ## Compensation - **max:** 280000 - **min:** 180000 - **currency:** USD - **stockOptions:** true ## Interview process ### steps ## Full description ## **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 2,300 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 Engineering Director, you’ll lead the engineering strategy and execution for Airwallex’s core identity and organization foundations, spanning user onboarding, authentication, access control, organization modeling, account ownership, and organization-level workflows. * Own the technical direction for highly available, scalable, and secure systems that provide a unified identity and organization foundation for Airwallex’s products. * Drive the translation of complex identity, security, and organizational requirements into reliable platform capabilities, partnering closely with Product, Design, Risk, Compliance, and Onboarding. * Build and develop a high-performing engineering team through hiring, coaching, performance management, and organizational design. * Raise the bar for engineering excellence across architecture, delivery, operational reliability, and security. * Balance delivery speed, system reliability, security, operational complexity, and long-term maintainability as the team evolves its platform foundations. ## What we're looking for ### Essentials * Significant experience leading engineering teams responsible for identity, authentication, authorization, account management, or other foundational platform capabilities. * Strong technical depth in designing and operating highly available, scalable, and secure distributed systems. * Experience setting technical strategy and translating ambiguous business, product, and security needs into clear engineering priorities. * A track record of building and developing high-performing engineering teams, including through hiring, coaching, performance management, and organizational design. * Experience partnering effectively with product, design, risk, compliance, and other cross-functional stakeholders. * Strong judgment in balancing delivery speed, system reliability, security, operational complexity, and long-term maintainability. * Clear, direct communication and the ability to influence at both technical and executive levels. ### Preferred ## 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 making decisions with incomplete information and moving quickly anyway. * You communicate clearly and directly across cultures, and you're thoughtful about how context shifts meaning across borders. * You know when to align and when to just decide. Collaboration isn't a way to avoid accountability. * You connect dots across functions and hold the big picture without losing grip on the details. ## Learn more about your team The Organization & Identity team is responsible for building and evolving Airwallex's core identity and organization foundations, covering user onboarding, authentication and access control through to organization-structure modeling, account-ownership management, and org-level workflow enablement. We continuously strengthen platform availability, scalability, and security so all products can depend on a unified, trusted identity and organization base. Our team owns identity, authN, authZ, and the technical capabilities behind identity verification, and partners closely with Risk, Compliance and Onboarding on broader controls. ## **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.airwallex.com_](http://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 if a candidate is submitted by a search firm/recruiter unless an agreement has been entered into with respect to specific open position(s). Search firms/recruiters submitting resumes to Airwallex on an unsolicited basis shall be deemed to accept this condition, regardless of any other provision to the contrary._ ## **Equal opportunity** Airwallex is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and anyone seeking employment at Airwallex is considered based on merit, qualifications, competence and talent. We don’t regard color, religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, ancestry, citizenship, sex, marital or family status, disability, gender, or any other legally protected status when making our hiring decisions. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.