Engineering Lead, Scale

About the role

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 250,000 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 2,300 of the brightest and most innovative people in tech across 27 offices around the globe. Valued at US$11 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.

Hiring Location: London (Hybrid Mode)

Total Compensation: 160,000 to 228,000 GBP

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 systems.

- Strong system design and object-oriented design fundamentals.

- Ability to balance abstraction, simplicity, and speed in technical decision-making.

- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.

- Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and lead technical execution.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

- Experience in fintech, payments, or other regulated domains.

- Experience with multi-tenant SaaS or platform architecture.

- Familiarity with PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, and cloud platforms such as AWS or GCP.

- Experience with API design, OAuth 2.0, or developer-facing platforms.

- Exposure to cross-region deployment, data residency, or customer-facing technical architecture.

Compensation Range: £100,000 - £150,000 + bonus + RSU

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.