Engineering Lead/Manager, Risk

ABOUT AIRWALLEX

Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. More than 675,000 businesses, including McLaren Racing, Qantas, SHEIN, and TikTok, use us, directly or through our platform partners, to run their financial operations or build and monetize financial products of their own.

We started in Melbourne in 2015 to build the infrastructure global commerce runs on. We're the regulated backbone behind global payments: not by accident, but by design. A decade plus, 85+ licenses, and a financial infrastructure spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.

We're co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, with more than 2,300 people across 27 offices. We hire builders with founder-level energy, people who move fast with good judgment, dig in with real curiosity, and make calls from first principles rather than waiting to be told what to do. Read our operating principles https://www.airwallex.com/en-us/operating-principles to see it in full.

HOW YOU'LL MAKE IMPACT

Own the strategy, roadmap, and delivery of real-time detection systems and client-facing fraud management products that protect customers and revenue at global scale.

- Provide strategic leadership for a mission-critical risk platform, aligning technical direction and capacity planning with business goals and regulatory requirements.

- Partner with Product, Design, Operations, Commercial, Strategy, Platform, Data, SRE, Security, and global engineering teams to shape the roadmap, remove blockers, and deliver measurable improvements in detection rates, false positives, chargebacks, reliability, and cost efficiency.

- Build and scale a high-performing engineering organisation, including managers and senior individual contributors, by setting goals, establishing career paths, developing talent, and cultivating ownership, inclusion, and excellence.

- Stay hands-on where it matters: guide architecture, review critical code and APIs, lead pragmatic technical deep dives, and raise the bar on design, code quality, observability, incident response, and operational readiness.

- Own system quality across real-time decisioning services, ensuring reliability, scalability, high availability, and high throughput under load.

- Lead talent strategy by recruiting, onboarding, and developing engineers and managers, building diverse teams, and creating succession plans for sustained velocity.

You'll be in our Singapore office five days a week.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

ESSENTIALS

- 8+ years of backend engineering experience, including 2+ years in engineering management and ownership of complex, distributed systems in production.

- Experience in risk management or fintech product engineering.

- A bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field.

- Strong proficiency in Java, including multithreading, high-concurrency patterns, I/O/NIO, and network programming.

- Deep experience with distributed systems and highly available, high-throughput architectures, including caching, partitioning, consistency models, and resilience patterns.

- Proficiency with Spring or Spring Boot, HTTP, TCP/IP, REST, and build tools such as Gradle or Maven.

- Practical experience with Docker and Kubernetes for containerisation and orchestration.

- Experience thinking across systems, data, models, rules, services, and people, rather than optimising one component in isolation.

- A track record of turning ambiguity into decisive roadmaps and measurable results.

- Experience balancing pragmatism and rigour: delivering incrementally while deliberately paying down risk and technical debt.

PREFERRED

- Leadership across multiple disciplines, such as frontend, backend, data or machine learning, and SRE, including manager-of-managers scope for Director-level candidates.

- Working knowledge of machine learning in production and strong data analysis skills for interpreting model and rule performance.

- Fluency in English for effective collaboration across global teams and stakeholders.

- Familiarity with Cassandra, Redis, NoSQL, Hadoop, and streaming systems such as Kafka, Flink, or Spark.

- Experience with one or more of Kotlin, Scala, Python, or Golang.

- Cloud experience with Alibaba Cloud, AWS, or GCP, including cloud networking, security, and cost management.

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

- Awareness of payments-related regulatory and security standards, including PCI DSS, SOC 2, and data privacy best practices.

- Experience coaching and multiplying leaders, attracting and retaining strong talent, and building succession plans.

YOU'LL THRIVE HERE IF

- You're comfortable owning the roadmap yourself.

- You're comfortable making decisions with incomplete information and moving quickly anyway.

- You're comfortable operating acr