Principal Software Engineer, Edge Team

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 Role We’re looking for a seasoned Principal Engineer to take full ownership of Airwallex’s edge networking stack—including API gateway, CDN, DNS, Global Accelerators, and traffic control services. This is a high-impact P5 architect role at the intersection of platform engineering, security, and product velocity. You’ll define the blueprint, lead implementation, and enforce governance for how all external traffic reaches and interacts with our platform globally. RESPONSIBILITIES 🌐 OWN THE EDGE NETWORK STACK - Design and evolve the architecture for Airwallex's external traffic stack including: - API Gateways (routing, filtering, throttling) - DNS services (global resolution & routing) - CDNs (caching strategies and invalidation) - Global Accelerators (latency and route optimization) 🔐 DEFINE AND ENFORCE BORDER SECURITY - Partner with InfoSec to design and operationalize: - DDoS protection, bot mitigation, and anomaly detection (e.g., Cloud Armor, WAF) - Rate limiting and QoS policy enforcement for prioritized customer/partner APIs - Firewall rule governance and bad actor prevention mechanisms - Intrusion Prevention and Auth mechanisms at the border 📦 POLICY-DRIVEN API ROUTE MANAGEMENT - Build end-to-end processes and tooling for how engineers expose public APIs: - Define policy and controls for route registration, approval, and change management - Work with platform teams to enforce compliance across microservices and gateways - Contribute to internal tools for observability, access review, and lifecycle auditing 🚦 ENABLE GLOBAL-SCALE, SECURE PERFORMANCE - Establish reliability and quality of service (QoS) goals for critical paths (e.g., payments, onboarding, auth) - Design for hybrid/multi-cloud edge strategy and backbone traffic replication - Tune latency, failover, and availability posture across regions WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR TECHNICAL SKILLS - Deep experience in cloud-native edge networking (API Gateway, DNS, CDN, GA, firewalls) - Proficiency with SDN concepts and tools (e.g., OpenDaylight, Envoy, NGINX/OpenResty, Kong, Apisix) - Familiar with Cloudflare, AWS or GCP Cloud Networking, techniques - Knowledge of hybrid/multi-cloud patterns and traffic engineering at scale - Hands-on with cloud...