Staff Software Engineer, GTPN Platform

Staff Engineer · Staff · Full Time

KR - SeoulUSD 200k – 280k2w ago
Apply for this role

Opens Airwallex's application page

Role

What you'll do.

Staff Software Engineer leading architectural design and evolution of distributed payment systems at global scale across 150+ countries. You'll architect and maintain core infrastructure for real-time local clearing, SWIFT, and proprietary treasury routing while solving complex financial integrity problems through fault-tolerant, idempotent systems. This role requires 7+ years of production software experience with deep expertise in distributed systems, system architecture, and owning reliability for mission-critical financial infrastructure.

Responsibilities

  • Architect Distributed Payment Systems at Global Scale: Design and evolve core payment infrastructure spanning real-time local clearing, SWIFT, and proprietary treasury routing mechanisms across 150+ countries. Lead architectural decisions that balance scalability, regulatory compliance, and operational efficiency for handling millions of daily transactions in multiple currencies.
  • Build Fault-Tolerant Financial Systems: Design idempotent, fault-tolerant systems for multi-currency reconciliation, asynchronous settlement, and compensation logic across unreliable banking partners. Ensure financial integrity through rigorous system design patterns and implement graceful degradation strategies for partner outages.
  • Own Payment Network Reliability and Observability: Define Service Level Agreements (SLAs), design monitoring infrastructure for real-time payment health tracking, and establish incident response protocols. Lead observability strategy across the payment platform to proactively identify and mitigate reliability risks.
  • Optimize Routing and Infrastructure Performance: Leverage payment telemetry and operational metrics to optimize routing decisions, identify infrastructure bottlenecks, and measure how technical changes impact settlement speed and conversion rates. Drive data-informed optimization cycles to continuously improve platform performance.
  • Set Technical Direction Across Distributed Teams: Lead design reviews for platform-wide infrastructure changes and architectural proposals. Collaborate with engineering teams across US, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai to establish technical standards, mentor engineers, and guide the evolution of the payment platform architecture.
  • Lead Incident Response and System Recovery: Champion incident management practices for critical payment systems, guide teams through complex failure scenarios, and drive post-incident reviews to prevent recurrence. Establish protocols for rapid resolution of issues affecting financial transaction flows.
  • Collaborate Across Global Engineering Organization: Work closely with product managers, designers, and engineers across multiple time zones to understand business requirements and translate them into robust technical solutions. Contribute to Airwallex's global financial infrastructure strategy and long-term technology vision.

Qualifications

What we look for.

Technical

  • Distributed Systems Architecture

    Expert-level experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems at scale. Deep understanding of consistency models, consensus algorithms, eventual consistency patterns, and handling network partitions in global payment systems.

  • System Reliability and Fault Tolerance

    Proven expertise in designing for high availability, defining SLAs, implementing graceful degradation strategies, and building comprehensive observability. Experience with idempotent operations, compensation logic, and recovery mechanisms for critical financial systems.

  • Payment Systems and Financial Infrastructure

    Strong understanding of payment settlement, clearing mechanisms, multi-currency operations, and asynchronous workflows. Knowledge of banking protocols including SWIFT, local clearing systems, and treasury operations is highly valuable.

  • Backend System Design

    Experience architecting production systems with focus on performance, scalability, and operational excellence. Understanding of database design, caching strategies, and transaction management for financial workloads.

  • Observability and Monitoring

    Expert-level skills in designing monitoring systems, creating meaningful alerting strategies, and building dashboards for operational insights. Experience with distributed tracing, metrics collection, and log aggregation for complex systems.

  • JVM Ecosystem and Java/Kotlin

    Strong proficiency with Java or Kotlin programming languages and JVM-based frameworks including Spring Boot. Understanding of JVM performance tuning, memory management, and optimization techniques for high-throughput systems.

Education

  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science

    Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or closely related field. Degree demonstrates foundational knowledge in algorithms, data structures, and computer systems theory essential for staff-level architecture work.

Experience

  • 7+ Years Production Software Engineering

    Minimum 7 years of experience building, deploying, and operating production software systems. Demonstrates capability to navigate real-world constraints, complexity, and the operational realities of large-scale systems.

  • Distributed Systems at Scale

    Hands-on experience architecting and maintaining distributed systems handling significant scale. Proven ability to solve problems related to data consistency, fault tolerance, and cross-system coordination.

  • Critical System Reliability Ownership

    Direct experience owning reliability for mission-critical systems in production. Track record of defining SLAs, implementing monitoring, designing for graceful degradation, and leading incident response efforts.

  • Technical Leadership and Architecture Reviews

    Experience setting technical direction across multiple engineering teams through design reviews, RFCs (Request for Comments), and architectural decision-making. Demonstrated ability to influence technical strategy at organizational level.

  • Data-Driven Decision Making

    Strong track record of using operational metrics, performance telemetry, and product data to inform technical decisions. Experience translating business metrics into infrastructure improvements.

  • Fintech or Regulated Financial Systems (Preferred)

    Prior experience in fintech, payments, or other regulated financial domains provides significant advantage. Understanding of compliance requirements, financial regulations, and banking operations is highly valuable.

  • High-Availability Team Leadership (Preferred)

    Prior experience leading teams responsible for high-availability, low-latency systems. Demonstrated ability to mentor staff-level engineers and establish reliability cultures across teams.

Skills

Required

  • Java or Kotlin Programming

    Expert-level proficiency in Java or Kotlin for building production systems. Comfortable writing idiomatic code, understanding performance implications, and leveraging framework capabilities effectively.

  • System Architecture and Design

    Ability to architect systems from first principles, considering scalability, reliability, performance, and operational complexity. Experience making trade-off decisions based on business requirements and technical constraints.

  • Distributed Systems Concepts

    Deep understanding of distributed systems principles including consensus, consistency models, failure detection, replication strategies, and asynchronous communication patterns.

  • Financial System Design

    Understanding of payment processing, settlement logic, reconciliation workflows, and financial transaction integrity. Knowledge of handling edge cases and ensuring correctness in financial computations.

  • System Observability

    Expertise in designing monitoring strategies, defining meaningful metrics, building effective alerting, and using telemetry to drive operational decisions and continuous improvement.

  • Technical Leadership

    Ability to influence technical direction through clear communication, strong reasoning, and collaborative decision-making. Comfortable with design reviews, architectural discussions, and mentoring other engineers.

Preferred

  • Spring Boot Framework

    Nice to have

    Deep experience with Spring Boot and Spring ecosystem for building backend services. Understanding of dependency injection, configuration management, and Spring's integration with common technologies.

  • SWIFT and Banking Protocols

    Nice to have

    Knowledge of SWIFT messaging, international banking standards, and local clearing mechanisms. Understanding of compliance requirements and banking infrastructure operations.

  • Message Queuing and Event Streaming

    Nice to have

    Experience with message brokers like Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar technologies for building asynchronous, event-driven systems. Understanding of ordering guarantees and exactly-once processing semantics.

  • Database and Storage Systems

    Nice to have

    Expertise in database design for financial workloads, understanding transaction semantics, consistency models, and operational considerations of both SQL and NoSQL systems.

  • Container Orchestration and Kubernetes

    Nice to have

    Strong experience with containerization and Kubernetes for deploying and managing distributed systems at scale. Familiarity with operational patterns for running production workloads in cloud infrastructure.

  • Multi-region and Multi-cloud Architecture

    Nice to have

    Experience designing systems that span multiple geographical regions or cloud providers. Understanding of consistency, latency, and operational considerations for global systems.

Tech stack

Languages

JavaKotlinPythonC++

Frameworks

Spring BootSpring FrameworkApache KafkaSWIFT Integration Libraries

Databases

PostgreSQLMySQLRedis

Tools

DockerKubernetesPrometheusGrafanaELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana)GitJenkins or GitLab CI

Other

Design Review and RFC ProcessesIncident ManagementSLA Definition and MonitoringPayment Reconciliation LogicMulti-currency Operations

Compensation

Pay and benefits.

Base·USD 200,000 – 280,000

Equity·Stock options

Benefits

  • Global Growth and Learning Opportunities

    Work on a world-class financial infrastructure platform serving 675,000+ businesses globally. Access to diverse engineering challenges and opportunities to collaborate with talented engineers across 27 offices in established and emerging tech hubs.

  • Founder-Level Autonomy and Impact

    Own your technical roadmap with significant autonomy and influence. Direct impact on core payment infrastructure decisions affecting millions of daily transactions across 150+ countries. Airwallex hires builders with founder-level energy who move fast with good judgment.

  • Staff-Level Career Advancement

    Opportunity to develop and grow as a Staff Engineer, setting technical direction, mentoring teams, and shaping long-term architecture across global payment infrastructure. Significant career visibility and leadership recognition.

  • Global Team Collaboration

    Work closely with engineering hubs across US, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Exposure to diverse perspectives, international problem-solving, and global infrastructure challenges that strengthen technical capabilities.

  • Regulated Financial Infrastructure

    Build systems subject to 85+ financial licenses across multiple jurisdictions. Deep expertise in compliance, regulatory considerations, and building reliable financial infrastructure that operates at the backbone of global commerce.

  • Complex Technical Challenges

    Solve genuinely complex problems in distributed systems, financial integrity, and global payment routing. Work with cutting-edge infrastructure challenges that provide significant technical growth and portfolio strength.

Process

Interview steps.

  1. 01

    Initial Screening Call

    Introductory conversation with Airwallex recruiter to discuss your background, experience with distributed systems, and understanding of the Staff Software Engineer role at GTPN. Verify alignment with role expectations and Airwallex culture of ownership and builder mentality.

  2. 02

    Technical Architecture Discussion

    In-depth conversation with GTPN engineering leadership focused on your approach to distributed systems design. Discuss specific examples of systems you've architected at scale, how you handle fault tolerance and reliability challenges, and your philosophy on balancing trade-offs in system design.

  3. 03

    System Design and Problem-Solving

    Detailed technical evaluation where you may be asked to design payment infrastructure components or solve complex distributed systems problems. Demonstrate your ability to think through consistency models, failure scenarios, and operational considerations. This may include whiteboarding or written design discussions.

  4. 04

    Leadership and Influence Assessment

    Conversation with senior engineering leaders about your experience setting technical direction, leading design reviews, and influencing across multiple teams. Discuss examples of architectural decisions you've championed, how you handle disagreement, and your approach to mentoring other engineers.

  5. 05

    Reliability and Operations Deep Dive

    Technical discussion focused on observability, SLA definition, incident response, and operational excellence. Share specific examples of critical systems you've owned, how you've defined and tracked reliability metrics, and your approach to designing for graceful degradation.

  6. 06

    Cross-functional Collaboration Round

    Conversation with product managers and engineers from related teams to assess your ability to collaborate effectively across functions and time zones. Discuss how you translate business requirements into technical solutions and your experience influencing product decisions.

  7. 07

    Leadership Interview

    Final conversation with GTPN leadership or Airwallex engineering management to assess cultural fit, your alignment with Airwallex operating principles of founder-level energy and first-principles thinking, and your vision for payment infrastructure evolution.

  8. 08

    Offer and Negotiation

    Successful candidates move to offer stage with discussion of compensation, stock options, benefits, and role expectations. Airwallex values transparent communication and ensures alignment on career growth opportunities and team structure.

Full posting

Original listing.

About Airwallex

Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. More than 675,000 businesses, including McLaren Racing, Qantas, SHEIN, and TikTok, use us, directly or through our platform partners, to run their financial operations or build and monetize financial products of their own.

We started in Melbourne in 2015 to build the infrastructure global commerce runs on. We're the regulated backbone behind global payments: not by accident, but by design. A decade plus, 85+ licenses, and a financial infrastructure spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.

We're co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, with more than 2,300 people across 27 offices. We hire builders with founder-level energy, people who move fast with good judgment, dig in with real curiosity, and make calls from first principles rather than waiting to be told what to do. Read our operating principles to see it in full.

 

How you'll make impact

You'll architect distributed payment systems at global scale, designing and evolving core infrastructure across real-time local clearing, SWIFT, and proprietary treasury routing in 150+ countries.

  • Architect distributed payment systems at global scale, designing and evolving core infrastructure across real-time local clearing, SWIFT, and proprietary treasury routing in 150+ countries.

  • Solve complex financial integrity problems by building idempotent, fault-tolerant systems for multi-currency reconciliation, asynchronous settlement, and compensation logic across unreliable banking partners.

  • Own the reliability and observability of the payment network by defining SLAs, designing for graceful degradation during partner outages, and building real-time payment health monitoring.

  • Use payment telemetry to optimise routing, identify bottlenecks, and measure how infrastructure changes affect settlement speed and conversion.

  • Set technical direction across a distributed engineering team by leading design reviews for platform-wide changes, collaborating with engineering hubs across the US, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.

You'll work from our Seoul office five days a week.

What we're looking for

Essentials

  • 7+ years’ experience building and operating production software, including distributed systems at scale.

  • Strong system architecture skills, with practical experience designing for fault tolerance, idempotency, asynchronous workflows, reconciliation, settlement, and failure recovery.

  • Experience owning reliability for critical systems, including defining SLAs, designing graceful degradation, building observability, and leading incident response.

  • Strong programming or scripting skills in a language such as Java, Kotlin, C++, Python or a similar language.

  • A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.

  • Experience setting technical direction across multiple teams through design reviews, RFCs, and architecture decisions.

  • Strong analytical skills, using operational and product data to guide technical decisions.

Preferred

  • Experience in fintech, payments, or other regulated financial domains.

  • Deep experience with JVM-based ecosystems, including Java or Kotlin with Spring or Spring Boot.

  • Prior experience leading teams responsible for high-availability, low-latency systems.

You'll thrive here if

  • You're comfortable owning the roadmap yourself.

  • You hold yourself to a high standard even when no one is watching. Quality and accountability aren't external expectations, they're internal ones.

  • You're comfortable with ambiguity. Give you a problem, not a prescription, and you'll run with it.

  • You enjoy working closely with people across multiple countries and time zones as part of one connected, global team.

  • You can advocate hard for a position, then fully support the team's direction once a call is made.

Learn more about your team

The Global Treasury and Payment Network (GTPN) team sits at the heart of Airwallex’s payment infrastructure. As one of our foundational businesses and a major contributor to our growth, we build and operate the core treasury and payment infrastructure that powers our global financial products. We operate at the intersection of global financial infrastructure and modern product innovation, expanding the reach and capabilities of our treasury and payment network, strengthening reliability and resilience, and building innovative payment products at global scale. We’re a distributed engineering team, with talented engineers across established and emerging hubs around the world. As we continue to expand, you’ll work closely with product managers, designers, and engineers to build and evolve products and platforms that solve complex financial problems and support businesses around the world.

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.

View all 103 roles