Engineering Lead/Manager, Risk (Relocate to Singapore)

Airwallex1 months ago

Location

AU - Sydney

Type

Full Time

Level

Senior

Role

Engineering Manager

Posted

Mar 3, 2026

Full TimeSenior

The role

Summary

This is a senior Engineering Lead/Manager role for Airwallex's Risk Platform team in Singapore, responsible for building real-time fraud detection systems and leading a team to protect global financial transactions. The position requires 8+ years of backend engineering experience with 2+ years of management, focusing on high-scale distributed systems, machine learning, and fintech risk management.

What you'll do

Strategic Leadership: Provide strategic leadership for mission-critical fraud and risk platform, aligning technical direction and capacity planning with business goals and regulatory requirements

Cross-functional Collaboration: Work with Product Management, Design, Operations, Commercial and Strategy teams to shape the future of fraud management products

Team Building and Management: Build and scale a high-performing engineering organization including managers and senior individual contributors, setting goals, establishing career paths, and running performance processes

Product Roadmap Planning: Partner closely with Product Management to define roadmap, prioritize measurable backlog, and deliver outcomes that improve detection rates and reduce false positives

Architecture Ownership: Serve as accountable owner for architecture and system quality across services, ensuring reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency for real-time decisioning under high load

Hands-on Technical Leadership: Guide designs, review critical code and APIs, and de-risk complex initiatives with pragmatic technical deep dives

Quality Standards: Drive design and code quality by instituting standards, reviews, and automated checks that raise the bar without slowing teams down

Cross-team Integration: Ensure collaboration with platform, data, SRE, security, and global engineering teams, removing blockers and fostering clear interfaces and SLAs

Operational Excellence: Own operational excellence including on-call readiness, incident response, postmortems, observability, capacity planning, and continuous reliability improvements

Talent Development: Lead talent strategy by recruiting, onboarding, and developing engineers and managers while building diverse teams and succession plans

What we look for

Technical

Backend Engineering Experience8+ years in backend engineering with complex, distributed systems in production

Engineering Management2+ years in engineering management with team leadership experience

Java ProficiencyAdvanced Java skills including multi-threading, high-concurrency patterns, I/O/NIO, and network programming

Distributed SystemsDeep experience with distributed systems and high-availability, high-throughput architectures including caching, partitioning, and consistency models

Spring FrameworkProficiency with Spring/Spring Boot, HTTP, TCP/IP, REST, and build tools such as Gradle/Maven

ContainerizationPractical experience with Docker and Kubernetes for containerization and orchestration

Risk Management ExperienceRisk management or Fintech product engineering experience required

Education

Bachelor's DegreeBachelor's degree in Computer Science or related technical field

Experience

Fintech/Risk DomainExperience in risk management or fintech product engineering

Production SystemsOwnership of complex, distributed systems in production environments

Team LeadershipProven track record of leading and developing engineering teams

Skills

Required skills

Java ProgrammingAdvanced Java with multi-threading, concurrency, I/O/NIO, and network programming

Distributed SystemsHigh-availability, high-throughput architectures with caching, partitioning, and consistency models

Spring FrameworkSpring/Spring Boot framework proficiency with REST APIs and build tools

ContainerizationDocker and Kubernetes for production deployments

Engineering Management2+ years leading engineering teams with complex system ownership

Risk/Fintech ExperienceDomain expertise in risk management or fintech product engineering

Nice to have

Multi-disciplinary LeadershipLeadership across frontend, backend, data/ML, and SRE disciplines

Machine LearningProduction ML systems and data analysis for model performance interpretation

Polyglot ProgrammingExperience with Kotlin, Scala, Python, or Golang

Big Data TechnologiesCassandra, Redis, NoSQL, Hadoop, Kafka, Flink, Spark for large-scale data processing

Cloud PlatformsAlibaba Cloud, AWS, or GCP with networking, security, and cost management

Risk-specific SystemsRule engines, feature stores, model serving, A/B testing, and stream processing

Compliance KnowledgePCI DSS, SOC 2, and data privacy regulations for payments industry

Compensation & benefits

Benefits

Relocation Support

Comprehensive relocation package for moving to Singapore

Global Team Environment

Work with 2,000+ innovative professionals across 26 offices globally

Career Growth

Accelerated learning opportunities in a high-growth fintech unicorn valued at $8 billion

Cutting-edge Technology

Work with latest technologies including ML, AI, and graph databases in risk management

Equal Opportunity

Inclusive workplace that values diversity and provides equal opportunities

Mission-driven Work

Meaningful work protecting global businesses and financial transactions at scale

Interview process

1
Initial Screening — Phone or video call to discuss background, experience, and interest in the role
2
Technical Leadership Interview — Deep dive into distributed systems architecture, scaling challenges, and technical decision-making
3
Management Interview — Discussion of team building, performance management, and leadership philosophy
4
System Design — Design a large-scale fraud detection system with real-time processing requirements
5
Executive Interview — Strategic discussion with senior leadership about vision, roadmap, and cultural fit
6
Reference Checks — Verification of past performance and leadership impact with previous colleagues