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 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.

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.

ABOUT THE ROLE

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.

RESPONSIBILITIES

- 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 an