Senior Software Engineer - Growth
Backend Engineer · Senior · Full Time
Opens Airwallex's application page
Role
What you'll do.
As a Senior Software Engineer - Growth at Airwallex, you'll architect and develop scalable microservices powering user acquisition and engagement strategies for a global fintech platform serving 250,000+ businesses. This San Francisco-based role requires 5+ years of backend engineering expertise with Java/Kotlin, distributed systems architecture, and cloud infrastructure (GCP/AWS) to drive high-traffic, event-driven systems supporting A/B testing, analytics, and real-time performance monitoring while maintaining regulatory compliance across global markets.
Responsibilities
- Microservices Architecture and Development: Design, architect, and develop high-performance microservices in Java/Kotlin that handle high-traffic, high-availability demands for Airwallex's global user base. Implement service-to-service communication patterns, orchestration frameworks, and fault tolerance mechanisms ensuring reliable system operation across multiple regions. Establish best practices for distributed system design including circuit breakers, load balancing, and graceful degradation strategies.
- Data Pipeline and Analytics Infrastructure: Collaborate with data scientists and product managers to architect data pipelines, event-driven architectures, and analytics platforms that enable data-driven decision-making. Ensure Growth data accuracy, reliability, and accessibility by designing robust data ingestion, transformation, and storage solutions that support real-time analytics and historical analysis for identifying user trends and conversion opportunities.
- Cross-Functional Technical Translation: Bridge the gap between product, design, marketing, and frontend teams by translating business requirements and user needs into scalable backend solutions. Partner with Frontend Engineers, Product Managers, Designers, and Marketing stakeholders to understand growth initiatives and technical constraints, delivering backend systems that enable rapid experimentation and feature deployment.
- Experimentation and Feature Infrastructure: Develop robust backend services supporting rapid A/B testing, feature toggles, and canary deployments. Implement real-time performance monitoring and metrics collection systems that enable quick iteration on growth initiatives. Build infrastructure allowing product and marketing teams to run safe, controlled experiments with minimal deployment overhead and comprehensive observability.
- Security and Compliance Implementation: Integrate secure coding practices and compliance frameworks throughout backend systems to protect user data and ensure adherence to global financial regulations (PCI-DSS, GDPR, SOX, etc.). Proactively conduct security reviews, implement encryption standards, audit logging, and data access controls while staying current with emerging security threats and regulatory requirements in the fintech space.
- Code Quality and Technical Leadership: Participate in architectural reviews and code reviews establishing high quality standards across the Growth team and broader engineering organization. Lead technical discussions on system design decisions, performance optimization, and engineering best practices. Mentor junior engineers and contribute to documenting architectural decisions and technical standards that promote code maintainability and knowledge sharing.
- Observability and Performance Optimization: Implement comprehensive monitoring, logging, and tracing using observability tools like Splunk, Grafana, and Prometheus. Establish dashboards, alerts, and SLOs that provide visibility into system health and performance. Continuously profile and optimize backend systems for latency, throughput, and resource utilization, identifying and addressing performance bottlenecks in critical user journeys.
- Cloud Infrastructure and DevOps: Work with cloud platforms (GCP preferred, AWS alternative) to design, deploy, and manage containerized microservices using Docker and Kubernetes. Configure auto-scaling policies, load balancing, and disaster recovery strategies ensuring system resilience. Optimize cloud infrastructure costs while maintaining performance requirements and implementing infrastructure-as-code practices for repeatable deployments.
Qualifications
What we look for.
Technical
Microservices and Distributed Systems
Deep expertise in designing and implementing high-throughput, low-latency, high-availability distributed systems. Proficiency in service-oriented architecture principles, inter-service communication patterns (REST, gRPC, message queues), and distributed transaction handling. Experience with eventual consistency models, service discovery, and handling cascade failures in complex systems.
Java/Kotlin Backend Development
Strong proficiency in Java or Kotlin with modern language features and idioms. Experience with Spring/Spring Boot frameworks for building enterprise applications, dependency injection, and transaction management. Understanding of JVM performance tuning, garbage collection, and memory management to optimize backend services.
Domain Driven Design and Event Architectures
Solid understanding of domain-driven design principles for modeling complex business domains. Experience architecting event-driven systems using event sourcing, CQRS patterns, or Apache Kafka/RabbitMQ for asynchronous processing. Ability to design bounded contexts and aggregate structures that scale with business complexity.
Cloud Platform and Infrastructure
Hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Amazon Web Services (AWS) including compute (Compute Engine/EC2), databases (Cloud SQL/RDS), load balancing, CDNs, and auto-scaling. Proficiency with containerization technologies (Docker) and container orchestration (Kubernetes) for production deployments. Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools for repeatable infrastructure management.
Observability and Monitoring
Practical experience with observability platforms such as Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus, and ELK stacks. Ability to design comprehensive monitoring strategies including metrics, logs, and traces. Experience setting SLOs/SLIs, creating meaningful dashboards, configuring alerts, and performing root cause analysis on production incidents.
Continuous Integration and Quality Engineering
5+ years experience with modern CI/CD practices and tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, etc.). Expertise in automated testing strategies including unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests. Experience with static code analysis tools, code coverage tracking, and quality gates ensuring high code quality standards.
Computer Science Fundamentals
Strong foundation in core computer science concepts including data structures, algorithms, complexity analysis, and OOP design principles. Understanding of database fundamentals (ACID properties, indexing, query optimization) and network protocols. Ability to reason about system design tradeoffs and make informed architectural decisions.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Engineering
Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical discipline. Strong theoretical foundation in algorithms, data structures, and system design principles established through formal computer science education.
Experience
Backend Engineering at Scale
5+ years of professional software engineering experience with focus on backend systems, microservices, or infrastructure. Proven track record building and maintaining production systems serving millions of users or handling high transaction volumes. Experience with performance optimization, debugging production issues, and evolving systems as requirements scale.
Growth and Experimentation Experience
Experience working on growth initiatives, go-to-market operations, or user acquisition strategies. Understanding of A/B testing frameworks, feature flagging, and metrics-driven development. Prior collaboration with Product, Data, and Marketing teams on growth-focused technical projects is advantageous.
Financial Services or FinTech Background
Experience in regulated financial services, payments, or fintech environments with understanding of compliance requirements, security standards (PCI-DSS), and financial data handling best practices. Familiarity with payment processing systems, cross-border transaction flows, or treasury operations is beneficial.
Data Engineering and Analytics
Experience building data pipelines, data warehouses, or analytics platforms. Familiarity with data tools (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift) and customer segmentation techniques. Understanding of how to structure data systems for analytical use cases and real-time reporting.
Skills
Required
Java or Kotlin
Expert-level proficiency in Java or Kotlin for backend service development with deep understanding of JVM ecosystem, memory management, and performance characteristics.
Microservices Architecture
Proven ability to design and implement production microservices including service communication, API design, versioning, and inter-service resilience patterns.
Distributed Systems Design
Strong expertise in designing high-availability, high-throughput systems with understanding of consistency models, failure scenarios, and distributed consensus.
Cloud Infrastructure (GCP or AWS)
Hands-on proficiency with major cloud providers for deploying and managing production applications including networking, storage, and compute resources.
Docker and Kubernetes
Practical experience containerizing applications and orchestrating them in Kubernetes environments for development, testing, and production deployments.
SQL Databases and Indexing
Strong database design and optimization skills including schema design, query optimization, indexing strategies, and understanding ACID properties.
Modern CI/CD Practices
Expertise implementing and maintaining continuous integration and deployment pipelines with automated testing and code quality checks.
REST API Design
Ability to design scalable, maintainable REST APIs with proper versioning, error handling, authentication, and documentation.
Preferred
Spring Boot Framework
Nice to haveHands-on experience with Spring Boot ecosystem for rapid microservice development including Spring Data, Spring Security, and Spring Cloud components.
Event-Driven Architectures
Nice to haveExperience designing and implementing event-driven systems using Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar message brokers with understanding of event sourcing patterns.
Go-To-Market Operations
Nice to haveBackground solving end-to-end GTM operations challenges including user acquisition funnels, onboarding optimization, and scaling go-to-market strategies.
Data Warehouse and Analytics Tools
Nice to haveFamiliarity with data warehousing platforms (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift), customer segmentation techniques, and analytics tooling for building data-informed products.
Observability Tools
Nice to haveHands-on experience with Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus, or similar monitoring platforms for building comprehensive observability into production systems.
gRPC and Protocol Buffers
Nice to haveExperience with gRPC for high-performance service-to-service communication and Protocol Buffers for efficient data serialization in distributed systems.
AI and LLM Integration
Nice to haveExperience integrating large language models or AI capabilities into internal tools or customer-facing products with consideration for performance and cost optimization.
Financial Compliance and Security
Nice to haveExperience with financial services compliance requirements including PCI-DSS, GDPR, and SOX regulations with ability to design compliant systems.
Compensation
Pay and benefits.
Base·USD 158,000 – 225,000
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
Our Growth Team sits at the heart of Airwallex’s mission, focusing on user acquisition and strategic market expansion. We leverage data and cutting-edge technologies to craft seamless, intuitive experiences that help millions of users discover, engage with, and benefit from our products.
From new-user funnels to onboarding optimizations, our Growth team is all about experimentation, rapid iteration, and driving sustainable business impact. Whether it’s designing scalable architectures for high-traffic pages, building robust A/B testing frameworks, or integrating global marketing platforms, the Growth team’s contributions directly shape how we attract and retain customers worldwide.
Joining the Growth team means you’ll have a front-row seat to the most crucial stage of our product lifecycle and play a pivotal role in fueling the next wave of our global expansion.
What you’ll do
As a Backend Engineer within the Growth team, you will architect, develop, and maintain scalable microservices and backend systems powering our growth initiatives. You will enable experimentation and data-driven decision-making, collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, and drive robust, secure, and high-performing technical solutions that support our global user acquisition and engagement strategies.
This role is based in San Francisco.
Responsibilities:
Architect, develop, and maintain microservices in Java/Kotlin (or similar languages), ensuring high-traffic, high-availability systems meet global user demands.
Implement best practices for service-to-service communication, orchestration, and fault tolerance.
Collaborate with data scientists and product managers to design data pipelines, analytics platforms, and event-driven architectures.
Ensure Growth data is accurate, reliable, and easily accessible for key decisions.
Translate business requirements into scalable backend solutions by working closely with Frontend, Product, Design, and Marketing teams.
Participate in architectural reviews, code reviews, and strategy sessions to continually improve backend service quality and performance.
Develop services that support rapid A/B testing, feature toggles, and real-time performance monitoring; continuously improve backend functionalities to enhance user engagement and drive conversions.
Integrate secure coding practices and frameworks to protect user data and ensure global regulatory compliance. Proactively address potential vulnerabilities and security risks.
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:
Bachelor’s degree or above in computer science or engineering related majors
5+ years of experience in modern engineering practices focused on continuous integration and quality engineering
Strong computer science fundamentals and understanding of OOP concepts
Experience with domain driven design and event driven architectures
Deep experience with high throughput/low latency/high availability distributed systems
Cloud experience with GCP (preferred) or AWS (EC2, RDS, ELB, CloudFront, etc.), and familiarity with Docker and Kubernetes
Familiarity with observability tooling such as Splunk, Grafana, and Prometheus
Preferred qualifications:
Experience with JVM-based programming in Java or Kotlin; familiarity with Spring/Spring Boot
Experience solving GTM operations end-to-end
Knowledge of data warehousing, customer segmentation, and analytics tools
Familiarity with building internal or customer-facing products using AI and LLMs
Personal attributes:
Technically proficient with robust expertise in Java/Kotlin and backend development
Empathetic, customer-focused problem solver
Data-driven, with strong analytical skills
Collaborative, knowledge-sharing team player and mentor
Adaptable, continuously learning, and quick to embrace new technologies
Self-motivated, demonstrates strong ownership and proactive leadership
Effective prioritizer, able to balance workload and maintain high quality standards
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.
Redirects to Airwallex's application page.
Other roles
More at Airwallex.
Engineering Director
Director
Senior Data Scientist, Algorithm (Lending & Onboarding)
Senior
Data Engineering Manager
Manager
Software Engineer, Frontend, Onboarding
Mid
Senior Software Engineer, DevOps
Senior