# Senior Backend Engineer, Liquidity Platform
**Company:** [Airwallex](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/airwallex)
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.
**Role:** Backend Engineer
**Seniority:** Senior
**Locations:** SG - Singapore
**Salary:** 130000–200000 SGD
[Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/airwallex/62989730-2731-4af4-9ff1-97c016207758)
Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/airwallex/senior-backend-engineer-liquidity-platform
---
## Responsibilities

- 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.

## Requirements

### education

- {"name":"Computer Science or Related Field","description":"Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related discipline. Equivalent practical experience in backend engineering and systems architecture is valued equally."}

### technical

- {"name":"5+ Years Backend Systems Production Experience","description":"Demonstrated 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."}
- {"name":"JVM Languages Proficiency","description":"Strong 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."}
- {"name":"Distributed Systems Fundamentals","description":"Solid 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."}
- {"name":"API Design and Database Architecture","description":"Proven 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."}
- {"name":"Event-Driven Architecture and Message Brokers","description":"Proficiency 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."}
- {"name":"Testing and CI/CD Pipeline Expertise","description":"Strong 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."}
- {"name":"Observability and Production Monitoring","description":"Expert 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."}

### experience

- {"name":"Financial Systems or High-Integrity Domain Experience","description":"Background 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."}
- {"name":"Data-Intensive Systems Development","description":"Experience 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."}
- {"name":"Global Multi-Market Systems Architecture","description":"Track 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."}
- {"name":"Financial Controls and Auditability Systems","description":"Experience 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

- {"name":"Backend Systems Architecture","description":"Expert 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."}
- {"name":"Kotlin/Java Programming","description":"Advanced 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."}
- {"name":"Distributed Systems Design","description":"Comprehensive 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."}
- {"name":"REST API and gRPC Development","description":"Hands-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."}
- {"name":"PostgreSQL and Relational Database Design","description":"Deep 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."}
- {"name":"Kafka and Event Streaming","description":"Production 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."}
- {"name":"Automated Testing Strategies","description":"Expert-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."}
- {"name":"Production Observability Implementation","description":"Hands-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."}

### preferred

- {"name":"Fintech and Payments Domain Knowledge","description":"Experience 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."}
- {"name":"Liquidity Management and Cash Operations","description":"Familiarity 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."}
- {"name":"Regulatory Compliance Systems","description":"Experience building systems supporting regulatory compliance, audit requirements, and financial controls. Understanding of compliance reporting, fund segregation, reconciliation processes and regulatory frameworks across multiple jurisdictions."}
- {"name":"Financial Analytics and Reporting","description":"Background 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."}
- {"name":"Multi-Tenancy and Global Systems","description":"Track 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."}
- {"name":"Advanced Messaging Patterns","description":"Deep 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."}
- {"name":"NoSQL Database Design","description":"Hands-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."}
- {"name":"Performance Optimization and Tuning","description":"Advanced skills optimizing backend systems for throughput and latency. Experience with profiling tools, database query optimization, caching strategies and identifying performance bottlenecks in production systems."}

## Tech stack

### tools

- {"name":"Apache Kafka","description":"Distributed event streaming platform powering event-driven workflows, liquidity events, transaction streams and asynchronous data pipelines across the organization."}
- {"name":"Prometheus","description":"Metrics collection and monitoring system for instrumenting backend services with counters, gauges and histograms supporting observability and alerting."}
- {"name":"Docker and Kubernetes","description":"Containerization and orchestration platform for deploying and managing backend services at scale across Airwallex's global infrastructure."}
- {"name":"Git and CI/CD","description":"Version control and continuous integration/deployment pipeline tools for code collaboration, automated testing and safe production deployments."}

### others

- {"name":"REST APIs","description":"HTTP-based API architecture for service-to-service communication and external integrations. Primary protocol for most backend-to-frontend and cross-team interactions."}
- {"name":"Distributed Tracing","description":"Tools and practices for end-to-end request tracing across microservices supporting debugging, performance analysis and operational visibility in distributed systems."}
- {"name":"SQL and Query Optimization","description":"Advanced SQL expertise including complex joins, window functions, query planning and optimization techniques for financial reporting and analytics queries."}
- {"name":"Event-Driven Architecture Patterns","description":"Design patterns for building event-driven systems including event sourcing, saga patterns and choreography. Used throughout liquidity management platform for consistency and scalability."}

### databases

- {"name":"PostgreSQL","description":"Primary relational database for storing transactional data, liquidity records, account information and financial records. Supports ACID transactions critical for financial correctness."}
- {"name":"Redis","description":"In-memory key-value store used for caching, session management, rate limiting and real-time data processing in high-throughput systems."}

### languages

- {"name":"Kotlin","description":"Primary backend programming language for JVM-based services. Modern language with excellent null-safety features, coroutines for async programming and seamless Java interoperability."}
- {"name":"Java","description":"Mature backend language commonly used in fintech and financial systems. Strong ecosystem for enterprise backend development with extensive libraries and framework support."}

### frameworks

- {"name":"Spring Boot","description":"Leading framework for building microservices and REST APIs on the JVM. Provides dependency injection, transaction management, security features and extensive integration capabilities for backend services."}
- {"name":"gRPC","description":"High-performance RPC framework using Protocol Buffers. Used for low-latency inter-service communication in distributed systems and event-driven architectures."}

## Benefits

### benefits

## Compensation

- **max:** 200000
- **min:** 130000
- **currency:** SGD
- **stockOptions:** true

## Interview process

### steps

## Full description
## **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.

## **Attributes We Value**

We hire successful builders with founder-like energy who want real impact, accelerated learning, and true ownership. You bring strong role-related expertise and sharp thinking, and you’re motivated by our mission and [operating principles](https://www.airwallex.com/us/operating-principles). You move fast with good judgment, dig deep with curiosity, and make decisions from first principles, balancing speed and rigor.

You're humble and collaborative; turn zero‑to‑one ideas into real products, and you “get stuff done” end-to-end. You use AI to work smarter and solve problems faster. Here, you’ll tackle complex, high‑visibility problems with exceptional teammates and grow your career as we build the future of global banking. If that sounds like you, let’s build what’s next.

## **About the team**

The Liquidity Platform team powers the core infrastructure that enables Airwallex to manage funds efficiently, securely and intelligently across the globe.

Our platform ensures that money is always in the right place, at the right time, and used in the most effective way. We build systems for liquidity management, safeguarding, investment, and cash data management and analysis. These capabilities are critical to supporting Airwallex’s global operations, regulatory obligations and capital efficiency.

As Airwallex continues to scale globally, liquidity becomes one of the most important and complex infrastructure challenges. We need to forecast funding needs, optimize cash movements, support safeguarding compliance across jurisdictions, improve investment capabilities, and uncover new opportunities for capital optimization through high-quality data and analytics.

We are looking for talented and driven backend engineers to join the Liquidity Platform team and help us build one of the world’s most advanced and efficient liquidity management systems.

## **What you’ll do**

You are an **experienced backend engineer** who is comfortable working in complex domains like financial markets, payments or other high-integrity distributed systems. You care deeply about correctness, simplicity and operability, and you’re happy to engage with product and non-technical stakeholders on trade-offs.

You’re pragmatic: you can balance ideal architectures with the realities of delivery, and you’re comfortable iterating on systems that are already in production.

This role is based in Singapore.

## **Responsibilities**

* Design, build and own backend services for global liquidity management, safeguarding, investment workflows, and cash data management.
* Develop systems that ensure funds are available in the right entities, accounts and currencies to support global business operations efficiently and reliably.
* Build scalable platforms for liquidity forecasting, cash positioning, internal fund movement, funding optimisation, and operational decision-making.
* Contribute to Airwallex’s global safeguarding compliance infrastructure by building reliable systems that support regulatory reporting, segregation of funds, reconciliation and control processes.
* Design and enhance investment platform capabilities that help Airwallex manage surplus funds safely, efficiently and in line with internal policies and regulatory requirements.
* Build data pipelines, models and analytical capabilities to improve visibility into cash positions, liquidity usage, fund flows and optimisation opportunities.
* Work on complex distributed systems using modern backend architecture, including microservices, event-driven workflows, Kafka, gRPC, REST APIs, and SQL/NoSQL datastores.
* Implement robust controls for limits, approvals, reconciliation, data quality, monitoring and auditability to ensure our platform behaves predictably under stress and failure scenarios.
* Work end-to-end on features: from requirements clarification and solution design, to implementation, automated testing, deployment, observability and operational runbooks.
* Collaborate closely with Product, Treasury, Finance, Legal, Compliance, Risk, Data and other engineering teams to design APIs, data contracts and workflows that are reliable, observable and easy to operate.
* Instrument services with metrics, logs and tracing, and use these tools to support capacity planning, performance optimisation, incident response and continuous improvement.
* Participate in code reviews, technical design discussions and knowledge-sharing sessions; mentor less-experienced engineers where appropriate.
* Take part in our on-call rotation, supported by strong observability, runbooks and team processes, to ensure the Liquidity Platform remains reliable and highly available.

## **Who you are**

We’re looking for people who meet the minimum qualifications for this role. The preferred qualifications are great to have, but are not mandatory.

### **Minimum qualifications:**

* 5+ years of experience building and operating backend systems in production.
* Strong programming experience in one or more JVM languages (e.g. Kotlin, Java) or a comparable backend stack, and a willingness to work primarily in the JVM ecosystem.
* Solid understanding of distributed systems fundamentals: concurrency, data consistency, idempotency, retries, backoff, and failure modes in networked services.
* Experience designing and working with REST and or gRPC APIs, and persistence layers using relational databases (e.g. PostgreSQL) and/or key-value stores.
* Proficiency with event-driven architectures and message brokers/streams (e.g. Kafka or similar).
* Strong focus on testing and quality: unit, integration and contract tests; familiarity with CI/CD pipelines.
* Good grasp of observability: metrics, logging, tracing and alerting, and how to use them to debug production issues.
* Clear written and verbal communication skills; comfortable working with cross functional partners in a fast-paced environment.

### **Preferred qualifications:**

* Experience in fintech, payments, treasury, banking, liquidity management, safeguarding, investment platforms, regulatory reporting or financial data systems.
* Experience building systems that require strong auditability, reconciliation, controls, approval workflows or financial correctness.
* Experience working with data-intensive systems, cash flow analytics, forecasting, reporting or operational dashboards.
* Familiarity with financial operations concepts such as cash positioning, fund movement, bank account structures, entity-level liquidity, safeguarding, investment limits or cash optimisation.
* Experience designing platforms that support global operations across multiple markets, currencies, entities or regulatory environments.

#Singapore

## **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.