Scale Engineer

Senior Software Engineer, DevOps

DevOps Engineer · Senior · Full Time

KR - SeoulUSD 90k – 150k1mo ago
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Role

What you'll do.

Senior DevOps Engineer leading infrastructure strategy for Airwallex, a global payments platform serving 250,000+ businesses. Design and optimize cloud infrastructure on Kubernetes and public cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) to support 10x growth while maintaining reliability, security, and cost efficiency. Requires 6+ years experience with distributed systems, strong cloud platform expertise, and production Kubernetes operations background.

Responsibilities

  • Lead DevOps Strategy and Cloud Infrastructure Design: Define and architect the DevOps strategy and cloud infrastructure roadmap optimized for performance, scalability, and security. Collaborate with cross-functional teams across geographies to design systems capable of supporting next-generation growth requirements and ensuring the infrastructure can scale efficiently across global operations.
  • Manage and Optimize Kubernetes Infrastructure at Scale: Oversee the design, deployment, and maintenance of large-scale Kubernetes (K8s) clusters serving domain services across Airwallex's global platform. Implement best practices for cluster management, resource optimization, and performance tuning to ensure reliable service delivery for internal and external customers.
  • Build Observability and Detection Capabilities: Design and implement comprehensive observability and monitoring systems that reduce time-to-discovery for infrastructure issues. Establish detection capabilities that enable engineering teams to maintain stability and reliability without sacrificing agility or introducing security vulnerabilities.
  • Establish Infrastructure Standards and Best Practices: Build consensus across DevOps engineers distributed across multiple geographies and feature teams regarding tooling, practices, and standards. Drive standardization initiatives that make best practices the path of least resistance rather than forced mandates, promoting adoption through empowerment and self-service capabilities.
  • Develop and Enhance Internal Tooling Platforms: Create and improve tooling and self-service platforms that empower the broader engineering organization. Focus on increasing developer productivity by automating manual support tasks, reducing operational toil, and enabling engineers to manage their own infrastructure deployments securely.
  • Optimize Cloud Costs and Resource Utilization: Implement strategies to optimize cloud expenditure across multi-cloud environments while maintaining performance and reliability standards. Balance cost reduction initiatives with the need for rapid product delivery and ensuring security posture is never compromised.
  • Mentor and Lead DevOps Team Members: Provide technical leadership and mentorship to junior DevOps engineers and infrastructure team members. Share expertise in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure management, and operational excellence to help the team grow and develop stronger capabilities.

Qualifications

What we look for.

Technical

  • Kubernetes Expertise at Production Scale

    Extensive hands-on experience operating and managing large-scale Kubernetes clusters in production environments. Proficiency in cluster architecture, networking, security policies, resource management, workload orchestration, and troubleshooting complex K8s issues in distributed systems.

  • Public Cloud Platform Mastery

    Expert-level proficiency in at least one major cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure). Deep understanding of cloud services including compute, networking, storage, databases, security, identity management, and cost optimization strategies specific to the chosen platform.

  • Infrastructure as Code and Automation

    Strong capability with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform or Pulumi for managing cloud infrastructure declaratively. Proficiency in scripting languages (Python, Bash, Shell) for automation, infrastructure provisioning, and operational tooling development.

  • CI/CD Pipeline Architecture and Implementation

    Experience designing, building, and maintaining robust continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines. Knowledge of deployment strategies, release management, automated testing frameworks, and integration with version control systems.

  • Observability and Monitoring Systems

    Hands-on experience with observability platforms and monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or equivalent solutions. Ability to design metrics collection, alerting strategies, log aggregation, and distributed tracing for complex microservices architectures.

  • Distributed Systems and Network Architecture

    Strong understanding of distributed systems principles, microservices architecture, service mesh concepts (Istio experience preferred), and network communication patterns. Knowledge of service discovery, load balancing, and inter-service communication at scale.

Education

  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Related Field

    Formal education in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related technical discipline. Equivalent practical experience and demonstrated technical depth may substitute for formal education.

  • Continuous Learning and Certification

    Demonstrated commitment to staying current with cloud technologies, infrastructure tooling, and DevOps practices. Relevant certifications (AWS Solutions Architect, Kubernetes certifications, cloud platform credentials) are a plus.

Experience

  • 6+ Years DevOps and Infrastructure Engineering

    Minimum six years of professional experience in DevOps engineering, systems engineering, or infrastructure operations roles. Demonstrated track record of designing and managing large-scale distributed systems that serve millions of transactions or handle significant computational workloads.

  • Production Kubernetes Operations

    Proven experience running and maintaining production Kubernetes environments at significant scale. Should demonstrate understanding of operational challenges, reliability patterns, upgrade strategies, and disaster recovery procedures for K8s deployments.

  • Large-Scale Distributed Systems

    Substantial experience working with large, distributed systems across multiple data centers or cloud regions. Experience with system reliability, performance optimization, capacity planning, and handling infrastructure scaling challenges at enterprise or startup scale.

  • Cross-Team Collaboration and Technical Leadership

    Track record of collaborating effectively with engineering teams across different geographies, time zones, and organizational structures. Experience influencing technical decisions, establishing standards, and driving adoption of best practices across multiple teams.

Skills

Required

  • Kubernetes (K8s) Administration and Architecture

    Expert proficiency in designing, deploying, and managing Kubernetes clusters and containerized workloads at production scale including cluster setup, networking policies, security models, and performance optimization.

  • AWS/GCP/Azure Cloud Architecture

    Deep expertise in at least one major public cloud platform with ability to design highly available, scalable, and secure cloud infrastructure including networking, IAM, storage, and compute services.

  • Python or Bash/Shell Scripting

    Proficiency in Python, Bash, Shell scripting, or similar programming languages for infrastructure automation, tooling development, and operational scripting. Ability to write clean, maintainable code for infrastructure tasks.

  • Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Pulumi)

    Hands-on experience with IaC tools for declarative infrastructure management, version control integration, state management, and automated infrastructure provisioning and updates.

  • Observability and Monitoring

    Expertise building and maintaining comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting systems. Proficiency with tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK stack, or similar platforms for infrastructure visibility and incident detection.

  • CI/CD Pipeline Development

    Experience designing and implementing automated deployment pipelines using tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or ArgoCD. Understanding of release strategies, testing automation, and deployment safety mechanisms.

  • Distributed Systems Design

    Strong conceptual and practical understanding of distributed systems principles, microservices architectures, service discovery, load balancing, and handling complexity at scale across multiple availability zones and regions.

  • Communication and Technical Leadership

    Excellent verbal and written communication skills with ability to explain complex infrastructure concepts to diverse audiences. Demonstrated leadership capability in establishing technical standards and driving consensus across teams.

Preferred

  • Service Mesh Architecture (Istio)

    Nice to have

    Experience implementing and operating service mesh solutions like Istio with expertise in traffic management, security policies, observability, and progressive delivery patterns. Understanding of sidecar proxy models and service-to-service communication management.

  • Service Registry and Service Discovery

    Nice to have

    Hands-on experience with service discovery patterns and tools such as Consul, Eureka, or Kubernetes DNS. Understanding of how to manage dynamic service registration, health checking, and client-side or server-side discovery patterns.

  • Ansible and Configuration Management

    Nice to have

    Experience with Ansible or similar configuration management tools for infrastructure provisioning, application deployment, and managing infrastructure state across diverse environments.

  • Advanced Kubernetes Features

    Nice to have

    In-depth knowledge of advanced Kubernetes features including operators, custom resource definitions (CRDs), service mesh integration, multi-cluster management, and Kubernetes security frameworks like RBAC and network policies.

  • Distributed Tracing and APM

    Nice to have

    Experience with distributed tracing tools like Jaeger, Zipkin, or commercial APM solutions. Understanding of end-to-end request tracing across microservices and using trace data for performance optimization and debugging.

  • GitOps and Declarative Operations

    Nice to have

    Familiarity with GitOps principles and tools like ArgoCD or Flux for managing infrastructure and application deployments through version-controlled Git repositories. Experience with declarative infrastructure patterns.

  • Kubernetes Security and Compliance

    Nice to have

    Strong background in Kubernetes security including pod security policies, network policies, RBAC implementation, secrets management, and compliance requirements in regulated environments.

  • Cost Optimization and FinOps

    Nice to have

    Proven track record optimizing cloud infrastructure costs through reserved instances, spot instances, resource rightsizing, and implementing FinOps practices without compromising reliability or performance.

Tech stack

Languages

PythonBash/ShellGo

Frameworks

KubernetesIstioHelm

Databases

Distributed Database Systems

Tools

TerraformPulumiPrometheusGrafanaDatadogArgoCDJenkinsGitLab CI/GitHub Actions

Other

AWS (Amazon Web Services)Google Cloud Platform (GCP)Microsoft AzureDocker and Container TechnologyGit and Version ControlIncident Management and On-Call Systems

Compensation

Pay and benefits.

Base·USD 90,000 – 150,000

Equity·Stock options

Full posting

Original listing.

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. 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 Infrastructure & Productivity team at Airwallex builds the technical foundation that allows our global engineering organization to scale. Our customers are our fellow engineers, and our mission is to make their daily work faster, safer, and more effective by managing the core platforms everyone relies on—from Kubernetes and Kafka to CI/CD pipelines and observability systems.

The real challenge lies in keeping these global systems highly reliable and secure while simultaneously optimizing cloud costs, automating manual support, and driving standardization without slowing down product delivery. We operate under the philosophy that best practices should be the path of least resistance, not a forced mandate. If you are a systems thinker who wants to work close to the core of the company and directly shape how we build, deploy, and scale software worldwide, this is where that work happens.

This role is based in Seoul, South Korea.

Address: Units 1006, Partners Tower, 83 Gasan digital 1-ro, Geumcheon-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea, 08589 서울 금천구 가산디지털1로 83, 1006 호(가산동, 파트너스타워)

What You'll Do

The Infrastructure team has a vision of building a reliable and effective cloud infrastructure for AWX services. They manage K8s clusters for domain services and maintain their reliability. Additionally, they create and enhance tooling and platforms to empower the engineering team with improved self-service capabilities.

As an Infra engineer in the team, you will be responsible for leading the design of our DevOps strategy, and working closely with cross-functional teams to develop and evolve the cloud infrastructure optimized for performance, scalability and security in order to support our next 10x growth.

You will bring to the team a level of expertise in operational platform management, developing observability and detection capabilities that will decrease time to discover problems and allow our teams to increase stability and not sacrifice agility or security.

A key aspect of this position will be building consensus amongst DevOps Engineers across geographies in different feature teams about the tools and practices we use, and evolving that consensus into agreed standards.

Who You Are

  1. You are a DevOps or Infra engineer with hands-on experience with at least one programming/scripting language (e.g. Python, Ansible, Shell). 6+ years working with large, distributed systems.

  2. You are an expert in at least one public cloud platform (GCP, AWS, or Azure) and large-scale Kubernetes (K8s) clusters and services.

  3. You have an operations background running production Kubernetes environments.

  4. Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

  5. Strong communication and collaboration skills.

Nice to Have

  • Istio or other service mesh experience, including traffic management

  • Service registry / service discovery experience

  • Infrastructure as Code tools (e.g. Terraform, Pulumi)

  • Experience building or maintaining CI/CD pipelines

  • Experience with observability/monitoring systems (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog)

Equal Opportunity

Airwallex is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate all qualified applicants based on merit and job-related qualifications, without regard to gender, age, disability, marital status, national origin, religion, or any other status protected under applicable Korean law.

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 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 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.

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