Software Engineer, Quality
Quality Engineer (SDET) · Senior · Full Time
Opens Airwallex's application page
Role
What you'll do.
Join Airwallex as the first SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test) on the Risk Platform team, where you'll architect and own quality standards for mission-critical risk decisioning systems protecting 150,000+ businesses and USD 260 billion in annual transaction volume. This role combines deep automation engineering expertise with strategic quality leadership—designing end-to-end testing frameworks, establishing deterministic test environments, implementing contract testing across service integrations, and championing testability practices across the team. You'll leverage AI-assisted testing, build jurisdiction-specific compliance coverage, and define release quality gates for systems where every millisecond decision carries real financial consequences.
Responsibilities
- Design and Build Comprehensive Test Automation: Architect, develop, and maintain end-to-end and regression automation test suites covering the complete risk decisioning pipeline—including KYC/KYB onboarding, merchant risk assessment, transaction scoring, and screening workflows. Integrate automation suites into CI/CD pipelines to ensure regressions are detected before production release, implementing quality gates that maintain system reliability across billions of daily events.
- Establish Deterministic Test Data and Environments: Create and maintain stable, reproducible test data frameworks and isolated testing environments that accurately simulate fraud scenarios, screening rules, and jurisdiction-specific requirements. Own the engineering of realistic test datasets that remain deterministic and trustworthy, preventing flaky tests and enabling consistent regression detection across the risk platform.
- Implement Contract Testing Strategy: Introduce and own consumer-driven contract testing protocols (e.g., Pact) between the Risk Platform and upstream/downstream service dependencies. Catch integration breakages early in development cycles, ensuring that REST API contracts, message-driven flows, and service-to-service integrations maintain compatibility across microservice architecture.
- Build Jurisdiction-Specific Test Coverage: Design and implement comprehensive test coverage for regulatory and jurisdiction-specific behavior across 150+ countries and 60+ currencies. Validate region-specific compliance rules, risk thresholds, and regulatory requirements to ensure the platform operates safely within all local regulatory frameworks.
- Define and Enforce Quality Gates: Establish release-quality benchmarks and automated quality gates that define what constitutes production readiness for risk-critical systems. Design post-release verification strategies including smoke tests and monitoring-backed checks to confirm risk systems behave correctly under production conditions and maintain data integrity.
- Own Testing for Major Client Projects: Lead end-to-end testing and release acceptance for high-impact client-facing projects and regulatory initiatives. Partner with engineering and product teams to define clear acceptance criteria, coordinate test execution across environments, and provide confidence in release readiness for mission-critical functionality.
- Champion Testability and Quality Culture: Drive adoption of testing best practices and testability-first principles across the Risk Platform team. Mentor engineers on test design patterns, automation frameworks, and quality engineering practices. Advocate for quality-oriented architecture decisions that make systems easier to test and verify at scale.
- Leverage AI for Testing Intelligence: Apply LLM-assisted tools and AI techniques to accelerate testing workflows—including test case generation, coverage analysis, and failure triage. Help define evaluation frameworks and regression testing approaches for the team's ML models and LLM-based agents, ensuring non-deterministic systems remain trustworthy and performant.
Qualifications
What we look for.
Technical
SDET/Test Automation Framework Development
Proven track record developing and maintaining scalable test automation frameworks (not just writing individual test cases). Demonstrated expertise building robust automation architectures that handle hundreds of thousands of test scenarios and scale with team growth.
Distributed Systems Testing
Hands-on experience testing large-scale distributed backend systems including REST APIs, asynchronous message-driven workflows, and service-to-service integrations across microservice architectures with complex dependency chains.
API and End-to-End Test Automation
Expertise in API testing, end-to-end automation, and CI/CD pipeline integration. Ability to build reliable test suites that run in automated deployment pipelines, with strong understanding of test data management, environment provisioning, and deterministic test execution.
Contract Testing and Integration Testing
Experience implementing contract testing frameworks (e.g., Pact, OpenAPI-based testing) and building comprehensive test data and environment tooling. Ability to design testing strategies that catch integration failures early without tight coupling between services.
Test Reliability and Flake Management
Deep understanding of test reliability principles including deterministic test data design, test isolation, environment management, and fast feedback loops. Proven ability to diagnose and eliminate flaky tests, ensuring test suites remain trustworthy as systems evolve.
AI and LLM-Assisted Testing
Experience using AI/LLM tools to enhance testing workflows—including test case generation, coverage analysis, and failure diagnosis. Ability to evaluate and test systems with ML/LLM components, including handling non-deterministic outputs and building evaluation harnesses.
Programming Language Proficiency
Strong programming skills with expertise in at least one systems-level language (Java, Go, Python, etc.) for building robust test frameworks, utilities, and infrastructure rather than simple test scripts.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Related Field
Formal education in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or equivalent demonstrating foundational knowledge of software architecture, data structures, and system design principles.
Alternative: Demonstrable Professional Achievement
Without formal degree, candidates with demonstrable professional achievement in test automation engineering, strong portfolio of frameworks built, and recognized expertise in the fintech/payments domain may be considered.
Experience
SDET or Software Engineer in Test Role
Minimum 4-6 years professional experience as an SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test) or Software Engineer in Test with documented success building and scaling test automation programs. Experience should demonstrate progression from building individual test cases to architecting framework solutions.
Backend Systems Testing at Scale
Experience testing systems that process high transaction volumes, handle complex workflows, or require sophisticated test data strategies. Familiarity with testing patterns for distributed systems, eventual consistency, and asynchronous operations.
CI/CD and Deployment Pipeline Integration
Hands-on experience integrating test automation into continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines. Understanding of how test suites fit into broader software delivery systems and the ability to design tests that provide rapid feedback without slowing deployment velocity.
Skills
Required
Test Automation Framework Architecture
Ability to design end-to-end test automation frameworks that handle API testing, UI automation, and complex multi-step workflows. Experience with implementing reusable components, data-driven testing patterns, and modular test design that scales across hundreds of test scenarios.
Java or Python Programming
Production-grade proficiency in Java or Python for building test frameworks, implementing automation utilities, and solving complex testing problems. Ability to write clean, maintainable code that other engineers can extend and build upon.
REST API Testing and Debugging
Expert-level experience testing REST APIs including request/response validation, authentication/authorization testing, performance validation, and debugging complex API interactions using tools like Postman, curl, and custom automation frameworks.
CI/CD Pipeline Knowledge
Practical understanding of CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, etc.) and experience integrating test suites into deployment pipelines. Ability to design test execution strategies that balance feedback speed with coverage requirements.
Test Data Management
Experience building and maintaining test data strategies including data generation, environment provisioning, and test data isolation. Understanding of how to create deterministic test scenarios for complex systems while maintaining test independence.
Problem-Solving and System Thinking
Strong analytical and debugging skills with the ability to understand complex system interactions, trace failures across distributed systems, and design testing strategies for adversarial and high-stakes scenarios where the cost of failure is measured in real dollars.
Communication and Mentorship
Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to document testing strategies, explain quality concepts to engineers with varying backgrounds, and mentor team members on test design and automation best practices.
Preferred
Fintech, Payments, and Risk Testing Experience
Nice to haveBackground testing financial systems, payment platforms, fraud detection systems, or risk management platforms. Understanding of regulatory requirements, transaction settlement processes, and high-stakes systems where testing carries business and compliance implications.
Contract Testing (Pact, OpenAPI)
Nice to haveHands-on experience implementing consumer-driven contract testing frameworks or OpenAPI-based testing to catch integration issues early. Demonstrated success with contract testing in microservice environments.
Jurisdiction and Compliance Testing
Nice to haveExperience testing systems with complex jurisdiction-specific behavior, regulatory requirements across multiple regions, or compliance testing for heavily regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, etc.).
ML and LLM Systems Testing
Nice to haveExposure to testing machine learning models or LLM-based systems including building evaluation harnesses, testing non-deterministic outputs, performance guardrails, and regression testing frameworks for AI systems.
Performance and Latency Testing
Nice to haveExperience performance testing systems on the critical path including latency profiling, load testing, and building performance benchmarks for high-transaction-volume systems where millisecond decisions drive business outcomes.
Graph Databases and Event Streaming
Nice to haveExposure to testing systems built on graph databases (Neo4j, etc.) or event streaming platforms (Kafka, etc.). Understanding of testing patterns for systems processing billions of events or complex relationship queries.
LLM-Assisted Development Tools
Nice to havePractical experience using AI and LLM tools in software development workflows. Familiarity with tools like GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, or Claude for accelerating test development, code generation, and coverage analysis.
Compensation
Pay and benefits.
Base·USD 130,000 – 180,000
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, 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
Risk Platform builds the decisioning infrastructure that sits between Airwallex and every dollar that moves through it, protecting 150,000+ businesses moving over US$260 billion a year across 150+ countries and 60+ currencies, and deciding, often in milliseconds, whether a new signup is real, a payment is safe, or a login is who they claim to be. The hard part is that fraud evolves fast, and every decision carries a two-sided cost: miss an attack and money is lost, over-block and a legitimate business can't get paid. We build this with streaming pipelines processing billions of events a day, graph databases exposing coordinated fraud rings, ML models scoring every transaction, and LLM agents that triage alerts. You don't need a fintech background, just an appetite for adversarial systems problems where the scoreboard is measured in dollars. If you want to help scale one of the world's fastest-growing financial platforms safely, this is the team.
About the Role
As the first SDET on the Risk Platform team, you'll help the whole risk team decide and define what quality means for risk-critical systems — the standards, practices, and quality gates everyone builds around. You're an engineer first: you build the automation, tooling, and infrastructure that let us ship changes to these systems quickly and safely.
Responsibilities:
Design, build, and maintain end-to-end and regression automation across the risk decisioning flows — onboarding (KYC/KYB, merchant risk), transaction scoring, and screening — and wire the suites into CI/CD so regressions are caught before release.
Establish stable, reproducible test data and isolated environments, including realistic fraud, screening, and jurisdiction scenarios, so automation stays deterministic and trustworthy.
Introduce and own contract testing between the Risk Platform and its upstream and downstream services to catch integration breakages early.
Build jurisdiction-specific coverage that validates regional rules, thresholds, and regulatory requirements.
Define and enforce release-quality gates, and design post-release verification (smoke tests, monitoring-backed checks) to confirm risk systems behave correctly in production.
Own testing and release acceptance for major client-facing projects, end to end, partnering with engineering and product on acceptance criteria.
Champion testability and quality across the team, and mentor engineers on test design and automation.
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:
Experience as an SDET / Software Engineer in Test, with strong programming skills and a track record of building test frameworks — not just writing test cases.
Solid experience testing large-scale distributed backend systems: REST APIs, message-driven flows, and service-to-service integrations.
Hands-on experience with API and E2E automation and CI/CD; experience with contract testing and managing test data and environments, or the ability to build these from the ground up.
A strong sense of what makes tests reliable: deterministic data, isolated environments, and fast feedback.
Use AI to accelerate testing — LLM-assisted test generation, coverage analysis, and failure triage — and help define how we test the team's ML models and LLM agents (evaluation, regression, and guardrails).
Comfort working in a self-directed, Agile team, with excellent written and verbal communication.
Preferred qualifications:
Exposure to risk, fraud, payments, compliance, or other regulated financial domains.
Experience testing systems with jurisdiction- or region-specific behaviour.
Experience with contract testing tools (e.g. Pact) and building test-data / environment tooling from the ground up.
Experience using AI/LLM tools in the testing workflow, or testing ML- or LLM-based systems (evaluation harnesses, non-deterministic outputs).
Performance and latency testing for systems on the critical path.
Life at Airwallex
Industry-leading salaries, plus equity for every employee.
Access to our mental wellness platform, including coaching and EAP sessions.
A paid day off on your birthday, generous parental leave, and paid volunteer leave.
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. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.
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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