Engineering Lead, Scale

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 2,200 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 https://www.airwallex.com/us/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 Scale engineering team at Airwallex builds the foundational systems that power our embedded finance platform at global scale. The team owns multi-tenant infrastructure, drives cross-domain product capabilities, and helps design technical solutions for enterprise customers. Key areas of ownership include: Embedded Finance Platform: Build and maintain the infrastructure powering customers like Rippling, Navan, Qantas, and SHEIN, with strong SLAs for availability, latency, and throughput. Cross-Domain Product Features: Own complex features that span business, regulatory, and technical domains, such as tax, compliance, and monetization. Solutions Architecture: Translate enterprise customer requirements into scalable technical solutions that support major commercial opportunities. WHAT YOU’LL DO As an Engineering Lead, Scale, you will lead a team building critical platform capabilities for Airwallex’s embedded finance products. This role combines people leadership, technical direction, and delivery ownership. You will manage engineers directly and be accountable for team health, execution, and long-term technical quality. While you remain technically credible and involved at an architectural level, your focus is enabling the team to do its best work. RESPONSIBILITIES - Manage, coach, and grow a team of engineers through feedback, performance management, and career development. - Set technical direction for scalable, reliable backend systems and partner with senior engineers on architecture and design. - Ensure high standards for system design, code quality, testing, and operational excellence. - Drive improvements across reliability, observability, security, and developer productivity. - Work cross-functionally with product, design, compliance, sales, and engineering leaders to align execution with business priorities. - Help translate enterprise customer and commercial requirements into pragmatic technical solutions. WHO YOU ARE MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS - 8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 1+ years in a people leadership role. - Strong backend development experience with Java/Spring Boot. - Proven experience designing and operating large-scale, distributed production syst