# Staff Software Engineer, GTPN Platform **Company:** [Airwallex](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/airwallex) 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. **Role:** Staff Engineer **Seniority:** Staff **Locations:** KR - Seoul **Salary:** 200000–280000 USD [Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/airwallex/5d5ae093-c9ea-4fce-b504-a8bca9330e13) Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/airwallex/staff-software-engineer-gtpn-platform-5d5ae093 --- ## 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. ## Requirements ### education - {"name":"Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science","description":"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."} ### technical - {"name":"Distributed Systems Architecture","description":"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."} - {"name":"System Reliability and Fault Tolerance","description":"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."} - {"name":"Payment Systems and Financial Infrastructure","description":"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."} - {"name":"Backend System Design","description":"Experience architecting production systems with focus on performance, scalability, and operational excellence. Understanding of database design, caching strategies, and transaction management for financial workloads."} - {"name":"Observability and Monitoring","description":"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."} - {"name":"JVM Ecosystem and Java/Kotlin","description":"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."} ### experience - {"name":"7+ Years Production Software Engineering","description":"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."} - {"name":"Distributed Systems at Scale","description":"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."} - {"name":"Critical System Reliability Ownership","description":"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."} - {"name":"Technical Leadership and Architecture Reviews","description":"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."} - {"name":"Data-Driven Decision Making","description":"Strong track record of using operational metrics, performance telemetry, and product data to inform technical decisions. Experience translating business metrics into infrastructure improvements."} - {"name":"Fintech or Regulated Financial Systems (Preferred)","description":"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."} - {"name":"High-Availability Team Leadership (Preferred)","description":"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 - {"name":"Java or Kotlin Programming","description":"Expert-level proficiency in Java or Kotlin for building production systems. Comfortable writing idiomatic code, understanding performance implications, and leveraging framework capabilities effectively."} - {"name":"System Architecture and Design","description":"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."} - {"name":"Distributed Systems Concepts","description":"Deep understanding of distributed systems principles including consensus, consistency models, failure detection, replication strategies, and asynchronous communication patterns."} - {"name":"Financial System Design","description":"Understanding of payment processing, settlement logic, reconciliation workflows, and financial transaction integrity. Knowledge of handling edge cases and ensuring correctness in financial computations."} - {"name":"System Observability","description":"Expertise in designing monitoring strategies, defining meaningful metrics, building effective alerting, and using telemetry to drive operational decisions and continuous improvement."} - {"name":"Technical Leadership","description":"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 - {"name":"Spring Boot Framework","description":"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."} - {"name":"SWIFT and Banking Protocols","description":"Knowledge of SWIFT messaging, international banking standards, and local clearing mechanisms. Understanding of compliance requirements and banking infrastructure operations."} - {"name":"Message Queuing and Event Streaming","description":"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."} - {"name":"Database and Storage Systems","description":"Expertise in database design for financial workloads, understanding transaction semantics, consistency models, and operational considerations of both SQL and NoSQL systems."} - {"name":"Container Orchestration and Kubernetes","description":"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."} - {"name":"Multi-region and Multi-cloud Architecture","description":"Experience designing systems that span multiple geographical regions or cloud providers. Understanding of consistency, latency, and operational considerations for global systems."} ## Tech stack ### tools - {"name":"Docker","description":"Container technology for packaging and deploying payment infrastructure services consistently across development, testing, and production environments."} - {"name":"Kubernetes","description":"Container orchestration platform for managing deployment, scaling, and operation of payment services across multiple regions and data centers."} - {"name":"Prometheus","description":"Metrics collection and monitoring platform for observability of payment system health, latency, throughput, and error rates in real-time."} - {"name":"Grafana","description":"Visualization platform for creating dashboards and alerting on payment system metrics. Used for real-time monitoring of platform health and performance."} - {"name":"ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana)","description":"Centralized logging and log analysis platform for aggregate search and troubleshooting across distributed payment infrastructure components."} - {"name":"Git","description":"Version control system for managing codebase across distributed global engineering teams across multiple countries."} - {"name":"Jenkins or GitLab CI","description":"Continuous integration and deployment pipelines for automated testing and deployment of payment infrastructure changes with safety guards."} ### others - {"name":"Design Review and RFC Processes","description":"Structured approaches to technical decision-making through architecture reviews and Request for Comments. Essential for coordinating infrastructure changes across global teams."} - {"name":"Incident Management","description":"Frameworks and tools for managing production incidents, including root cause analysis, post-mortems, and continuous improvement processes for financial systems."} - {"name":"SLA Definition and Monitoring","description":"Methodologies for defining Service Level Agreements, tracking compliance, and using SLA metrics to drive reliability improvements in payment systems."} - {"name":"Payment Reconciliation Logic","description":"Domain knowledge around reconciliation algorithms, identifying discrepancies between booking and settlement, compensation logic for failed transactions, and audit trail maintenance."} - {"name":"Multi-currency Operations","description":"Understanding of currency conversion, foreign exchange handling, settlement in multiple currencies, and managing regulatory requirements across different jurisdictions."} ### databases - {"name":"PostgreSQL","description":"Primary relational database for transactional consistency in payment settlement and reconciliation workloads. Supports ACID guarantees critical for financial data integrity."} - {"name":"MySQL","description":"Additional relational database supporting operational workloads and systems requiring strong consistency for financial transactions."} - {"name":"Redis","description":"In-memory data store used for caching, real-time metrics aggregation, and low-latency access to payment routing information and state management."} ### languages - {"name":"Java","description":"Primary backend language for GTPN platform development. Used for building core payment infrastructure services and distributed system components."} - {"name":"Kotlin","description":"JVM-based language supported by Airwallex for modern backend development. Offers conciseness and safety features for building reliable payment systems."} - {"name":"Python","description":"Used for scripting, infrastructure automation, analytics, and data pipeline development supporting payment infrastructure monitoring."} - {"name":"C++","description":"Performance-critical systems and infrastructure components where low-latency, high-throughput requirements demand compiled language efficiency."} ### frameworks - {"name":"Spring Boot","description":"Primary framework for building microservices and backend APIs within the GTPN platform. Provides dependency injection, configuration management, and integration with supporting technologies."} - {"name":"Spring Framework","description":"Comprehensive framework providing application framework capabilities, transaction management, and enterprise integration patterns for financial system development."} - {"name":"Apache Kafka","description":"Event streaming and message queue platform for asynchronous workflows, payment event processing, and real-time data distribution across the payment infrastructure."} - {"name":"SWIFT Integration Libraries","description":"Specialized frameworks and libraries for integrating with SWIFT messaging network, handling international payment standards and compliance requirements."} ## Benefits ### benefits - {"name":"Global Growth and Learning Opportunities","description":"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."} - {"name":"Founder-Level Autonomy and Impact","description":"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."} - {"name":"Staff-Level Career Advancement","description":"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."} - {"name":"Global Team Collaboration","description":"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."} - {"name":"Regulated Financial Infrastructure","description":"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."} - {"name":"Complex Technical Challenges","description":"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."} ## Compensation - **max:** 280000 - **min:** 200000 - **currency:** USD - **stockOptions:** true ## Interview process ### steps - {"name":"Initial Screening Call","description":"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."} - {"name":"Technical Architecture Discussion","description":"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."} - {"name":"System Design and Problem-Solving","description":"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."} - {"name":"Leadership and Influence Assessment","description":"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."} - {"name":"Reliability and Operations Deep Dive","description":"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."} - {"name":"Cross-functional Collaboration Round","description":"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."} - {"name":"Leadership Interview","description":"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."} - {"name":"Offer and Negotiation","description":"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 description ## **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](https://www.airwallex.com/en-us/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_](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.