Senior Backend Engineer, Liquidity Platform

Airwallex5 days ago

Location

SG - Singapore

Type

Full Time

Salary

SGD 130,000 – 200,000

Level

Senior

Role

Backend Engineer

Posted

Jul 14, 2026

Full TimeSenior

The role

Summary

Join Airwallex's Liquidity Platform team as a Senior Backend Engineer responsible for designing and operating global liquidity management systems, safeguarding infrastructure, and investment platforms that power the company's payments and financial services for 250,000+ businesses worldwide. This role requires 5+ years of backend systems experience, expertise in JVM languages, distributed systems fundamentals, and proven ability to build high-integrity financial systems at scale. You'll work across complex domains including payments, treasury, and regulatory compliance while collaborating with product, finance, and compliance teams to build one of the world's most advanced liquidity management platforms.

What you'll do

Design and Operate Global Liquidity Management Backend Services: Architect, build and own scalable backend services for global liquidity management, safeguarding workflows, investment platforms, and cash data management systems. Ensure funds are positioned efficiently across entities, accounts and currencies to support Airwallex's worldwide operations serving 250,000+ businesses.

Develop Scalable Liquidity Platform Infrastructure: Build resilient platforms for liquidity forecasting, cash positioning, internal fund movement optimization, funding analysis, and operational decision-making. Design systems that handle high volumes of transactions with sub-second latencies and exceptional reliability.

Implement Regulatory Safeguarding and Compliance Infrastructure: Contribute to Airwallex's global safeguarding compliance framework by developing reliable systems supporting regulatory reporting, fund segregation, reconciliation processes, and audit controls. Ensure systems meet multi-jurisdictional regulatory requirements across the company's 27 global offices.

Engineer Investment and Cash Management Capabilities: Design and enhance investment platform features enabling secure management of surplus funds aligned with internal policies and regulatory constraints. Build sophisticated cash positioning analytics and reporting systems that unlock optimization opportunities.

Build Data Pipelines and Analytics Infrastructure: Develop end-to-end data pipelines, models and analytical capabilities providing visibility into cash positions, fund flows, liquidity utilization, and capital optimization opportunities. Enable business stakeholders with actionable insights through robust data integration and visualization systems.

Architect Modern Distributed Backend Systems: Work on sophisticated distributed systems using microservices architecture, event-driven workflows, Kafka streams, gRPC protocols, REST APIs, and both SQL and NoSQL datastores. Design systems that scale reliably while maintaining data consistency across global infrastructure.

Implement Robust Financial Controls and Auditability: Engineer comprehensive controls for transaction limits, approval workflows, reconciliation processes, data quality validation, monitoring and audit trails. Ensure platform behaves predictably under failure scenarios and maintains financial correctness across all operations.

Own Features End-to-End with Operational Excellence: Take full ownership of features from requirements gathering and architecture design through implementation, comprehensive testing, deployment, observability configuration and operational documentation. Build monitoring dashboards and runbooks that enable team to operate systems reliably in production.

Collaborate Across Cross-Functional Engineering and Business Teams: Work closely with Product, Treasury, Finance, Legal, Compliance, Risk and other engineering teams to design robust APIs, data contracts and workflows. Communicate complex technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders and incorporate feedback into system design.

Instrument Systems for Observability and Performance Optimization: Implement comprehensive metrics, structured logging, distributed tracing and alerting across backend services. Use observability data to support capacity planning, identify performance bottlenecks, accelerate incident response and drive continuous improvement initiatives.

Mentor Engineers and Drive Technical Excellence: Participate actively in code reviews, lead technical design discussions, facilitate knowledge-sharing sessions and mentor junior engineers. Raise code quality standards and help team members grow their backend engineering skills and domain expertise.

Support On-Call Operations and Incident Response: Participate in the team's on-call rotation supporting production systems with strong observability, comprehensive runbooks and established team processes. Respond to incidents affecting the Liquidity Platform's reliability and availability, driving root cause analysis and preventive improvements.

What we look for

Technical

5+ Years Backend Systems Production ExperienceDemonstrated expertise building, deploying and operating backend systems in production environments handling real-world workloads and complexity. Deep understanding of production operations, incident response, and iterating on live systems.

JVM Languages ProficiencyStrong programming skills in JVM-based languages such as Kotlin, Java, or equivalent backend stack. Demonstrated ability to write performant, maintainable code with deep language-specific optimization knowledge. Willingness to work primarily in JVM ecosystem.

Distributed Systems FundamentalsSolid grasp of distributed systems theory including concurrency patterns, data consistency models (ACID, eventual consistency), idempotency implementation, retry strategies with backoff, and failure modes in networked services. Experience debugging and resolving distributed system issues.

API Design and Database ArchitectureProven experience designing robust REST and/or gRPC APIs following industry best practices. Strong persistence layer expertise with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL/key-value stores (Redis, DynamoDB). Understanding of query optimization and schema design patterns.

Event-Driven Architecture and Message BrokersProficiency building event-driven systems using modern message brokers and stream processors. Production experience with Kafka, Apache Pulsar, or similar platforms. Understanding of event ordering guarantees, message delivery semantics, and stream processing patterns.

Testing and CI/CD Pipeline ExpertiseStrong focus on test-driven development with comprehensive unit, integration and contract test coverage. Experience with continuous integration and deployment pipelines. Knowledge of testing strategies for distributed systems and observability in testing.

Observability and Production MonitoringExpert understanding of observability fundamentals including metrics collection, structured logging, distributed tracing and alerting. Hands-on experience with tools like Prometheus, ELK stack, Jaeger or similar. Ability to instrument code for effective production debugging.

Education

Computer Science or Related FieldBachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related discipline. Equivalent practical experience in backend engineering and systems architecture is valued equally.

Experience

Financial Systems or High-Integrity Domain ExperienceBackground building systems in fintech, payments processing, treasury management, banking, liquidity management, safeguarding infrastructure, investment platforms, regulatory reporting or financial data systems. Understanding of financial domain complexity and regulatory considerations.

Data-Intensive Systems DevelopmentExperience designing and building systems handling large data volumes including cash flow analytics, financial forecasting, reporting systems, operational dashboards and data warehousing. Expertise in data quality, consistency and correctness under scale.

Global Multi-Market Systems ArchitectureTrack record designing platforms supporting global operations across multiple markets, time zones, currencies, legal entities and regulatory environments. Understanding of multi-tenancy, compliance complexity and operational challenges at global scale.

Financial Controls and Auditability SystemsExperience building systems requiring strong auditability, detailed reconciliation processes, approval workflows, transaction controls and financial correctness guarantees. Familiarity with audit trails, regulatory reporting and compliance infrastructure.

Skills

Required skills

Backend Systems ArchitectureExpert ability to design scalable, reliable backend architectures using microservices patterns, distributed systems principles and modern architecture paradigms. Experience balancing ideal designs with production realities and iteration on live systems.

Kotlin/Java ProgrammingAdvanced proficiency in Kotlin, Java or other JVM languages. Deep knowledge of language features, performance characteristics, memory management, concurrency primitives and ecosystem libraries for backend systems.

Distributed Systems DesignComprehensive understanding of distributed systems patterns including consensus algorithms, eventual consistency, idempotency, error handling strategies and failure recovery. Ability to reason about system behavior under fault conditions.

REST API and gRPC DevelopmentHands-on expertise designing and implementing robust REST APIs and gRPC services. Knowledge of API versioning, backward compatibility, performance optimization and consumer-driven contracts. Experience with API gateway patterns and protocol-specific optimization.

PostgreSQL and Relational Database DesignDeep expertise in SQL, relational database design and optimization using systems like PostgreSQL or MySQL. Proficiency in query optimization, indexing strategies, transaction management and performance tuning for high-throughput workloads.

Kafka and Event StreamingProduction experience with Apache Kafka or equivalent streaming platforms. Understanding of topics, partitions, consumer groups, delivery guarantees and performance tuning. Ability to design event schemas and streaming pipelines.

Automated Testing StrategiesExpert-level ability to write comprehensive unit, integration and contract tests ensuring high code coverage and quality. Knowledge of testing frameworks, mocking strategies, test-driven development and testing patterns for distributed systems.

Production Observability ImplementationHands-on expertise instrumenting systems with metrics, logs and traces for production visibility. Experience with observability platforms and using observability data to debug issues, optimize performance and plan capacity.

Nice to have

Fintech and Payments Domain KnowledgeExperience in fintech, payments processing, treasury management or banking systems. Understanding of payment workflows, settlement processes, compliance regulations, risk management and operational complexity in financial technology.

Liquidity Management and Cash OperationsFamiliarity with financial operations concepts including cash positioning, fund movement strategies, bank account structures, entity-level liquidity management, safeguarding requirements, investment limit frameworks and cash optimization techniques.

Regulatory Compliance SystemsExperience building systems supporting regulatory compliance, audit requirements, and financial controls. Understanding of compliance reporting, fund segregation, reconciliation processes and regulatory frameworks across multiple jurisdictions.

Financial Analytics and ReportingBackground with data-intensive systems including cash flow analytics, financial forecasting models, reporting dashboards and business intelligence tools. Experience ensuring data accuracy and consistency in financial reporting contexts.

Multi-Tenancy and Global SystemsTrack record architecting systems for multi-tenant environments, global scale and multiple regulatory jurisdictions. Experience handling currency conversions, time zone complexities and operational consistency across distributed global infrastructure.

Advanced Messaging PatternsDeep expertise with event-driven architectures, saga patterns, choreography vs orchestration trade-offs and advanced Kafka or stream processing patterns. Experience designing systems with exactly-once semantics and complex event correlation.

NoSQL Database DesignHands-on experience with key-value stores, document databases or time-series databases (Redis, DynamoDB, MongoDB, ClickHouse). Understanding of when to apply polyglot persistence patterns and NoSQL vs relational trade-offs.

Performance Optimization and TuningAdvanced skills optimizing backend systems for throughput and latency. Experience with profiling tools, database query optimization, caching strategies and identifying performance bottlenecks in production systems.