Staff Software Engineer, Risk

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 200,000 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 2,000 of the brightest and most innovative people in tech across 26 offices around the globe. Valued at US$8 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 Risk Platform team at Airwallex is responsible for managing the risk for all the products at Airwallex, including GTPN, PA, Issuing, Onboarding, and Account takeover. The risk landscape is constantly changing, and fraudsters are becoming increasingly sophisticated. We are at the forefront of innovation in risk management.

Our mission is to keep Airwallex's products and services safe and secure, and make Airwallex a trusted partner for businesses around the world. We use cutting-edge technologies, such as graph, ML, and LLM, to implement and improve our strategy.

We collaborate with other teams and our customers globally to ensure a holistic approach for risk management.

This role is based in Singapore.

What you’ll do

As a Staff Engineer on the Risk Platform, you will be a senior technical leader and hands-on builder. You’ll own critical parts of our real-time detection platform and client-facing risk and fraud management products, setting the technical direction and raising the engineering bar while working closely with your manager and cross-functional partners.

You will:

• Lead the technical direction of core risk services, including real-time detection, decision engines, and risk tooling, ensuring they are reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient under high throughput and low-latency constraints.

• Design and evolve system architecture for distributed, event-driven risk systems (microservices, streaming pipelines, feature stores, model serving layers) that support global products and regulatory requirements.

• Own end-to-end delivery of complex initiatives: from high-level design and technical specifications, to implementation, rollout strategies, and continuous improvement.

• Be deeply hands-on in code and design, writing high-quality production code (primarily in Java/Spring Boot) and driving high-impact design reviews, RFCs, and architecture discussions.

• Partner closely with the Engineering Manager and Product Manager to shape the roadmap, define technical milestones, and translate business and risk objectives into robust engineering solutions.

• Champion engineering excellence by defining and enforcing standards for code quality, observability, reliability, security, and performance across the Risk Platform stack.

• Improve detection effectiveness by working with data and ML teams to integrate models, rules, and features into production systems, and by designing experimentation and evaluation capabilities.

• Drive operational excellence by improving on-call readiness, incident response, postmortems, SLIs/SLOs, capacity planning, and resilience patterns (graceful degradation, fallbacks, retries, timeouts, backpressure).

• Mentor and uplevel other engineers, including senior ICs: provide technical coaching, pair programming, design guidance, and feedback that helps them do the best work of their careers.

• Collaborate across teams (platform, data, SRE, security, and other product engineering teams) to define clear interfaces, SLAs, and ownership boundaries for shared services and infrastructure.

• Identify and pay down technical debt deliberately, balancing short-term impact with long-term platform health and enabling faster, safer delivery over time.

Who you are

We’re looking for people who meet the minimum qualifications below. The preferred qualifications are great to have, but not strictly required.

Minimum qualifications

• 10+ years of back-end engineering experience, including substantial time owning and operating complex, distributed systems in production.

• Deep experience in risk, fraud, or fintech systems (e.g., payments, banking, trading, or similar high-stakes domains where correctness and reliability are critical).

• Strong proficiency in Java, including multi-threading, high-concurrency patterns, performance tuning, and networked service design (I/O/NIO, HTTP/TCP, REST).

• Hands-on experience with distributed system design, including event-driven architectures, partitioning/sharding, consistency models, caching strategies, and resiliency patterns.

• Proficiency with Spring / Spring Boot and build tools such as Gradle or Maven.

• Practical experience with containerization and orchestration, particularly Docker and Kubernetes, in production environments.

• Solid understanding of observability and operations: logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and incident management for large-scale systems.

• Ability to lead complex technical initiatives end-to-end, influencing engineers and stakeholders without relying on formal management authority.

• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical topics clearly to engineers, product managers, and non-technical stakeholders.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with risk-specific components, such as rule engines, feature stores, model serving frameworks, real-time stream processing, and A/B testing / experimentation platforms.

• Working knowledge of machine learning in production, including model lifecycle, feature engineering, evaluation metrics, and online/offline consistency.

• Experience with modern data and storage technologies, such as Cassandra, Redis, NoSQL databases, Hadoop, and streaming systems like Kafka, Flink, or Spark.

• Polyglot engineering experience with one or more of Kotlin, Scala, Python, or Golang.

• Cloud experience with Alibaba Cloud, AWS, or GCP, including cloud networking, security best practices, and cost awareness.

• Familiarity with regulatory and security standards relevant to payments and financial services (e.g., PCI DSS, SOC 2, data privacy and protection best practices).

• Demonstrated impact as a Staff or Principal Engineer (or equivalent) in high-growth, high-scale environments.

What Will Set You Apart

• You think in systems – connecting data, models, rules, services, and processes – and you optimize for overall risk and customer outcomes, not just local component metrics.

• You have a track record of designing and shipping mission-critical, low-latency systems that support real-time decisions at scale.

• You are comfortable operating in ambiguity, turning fuzzy business and risk goals into crisp technical strategies, roadmaps, and measurable outcomes.

• You are a multiplier for other engineers: people seek you out for design guidance, code reviews, and debugging; teams move faster and with more confidence when you’re involved.

• You balance pragmatism and rigor – you know when to build scrappy experiments, when to harden systems, and how to evolve architectures incrementally without destabilizing operations.

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.