Staff Software Engineer, Cards

About Airwallex

Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. More than 676,000 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 to see it in full.

About the team

The Engineering team at Airwallex is a diverse group of innovators, builders, and problem solvers, driven by a mission to empower businesses to operate anywhere, anytime. We thrive in a collaborative and fast-paced environment, where we're constantly pushing the boundaries of what's possible in the financial technology space. As a team, we value technical craftsmanship, continuous learning, and a strong sense of ownership, working together to build scalable, reliable, and secure products that empower businesses of all sizes to grow without borders.

The Cards team at Airwallex builds and maintains distributed systems that enable businesses to issue debit cards and manage expenses at scale. The team addresses complex requirements around compliance, security, and the evolving needs of global users, supporting millions of seamless card transactions and ensuring robust, reliable expense management solutions for companies worldwide.

What you'll do

As a Staff Engineer on the Cards team, you will lead the architecture and development of complex backend systems that support our card products. You will drive cross-team technical initiatives, mentor engineers, and shape the long-term engineering strategy to ensure scalability, security, and reliability at a global scale.

This role is based in Singapore.

Responsibilities

• Drive the architecture, design, and evolution of complex backend systems that support the Cards product.

• Lead cross-functional technical initiatives and ensure alignment with long-term engineering goals.

• Own the full lifecycle of backend services—from idea to design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance.

• Guide teams in making scalable, secure, and high-performing system design decisions.

• Establish engineering best practices around observability, testing, and API design.

• Mentor and support the growth of engineers across the team.

• Collaborate closely with product, design, and infrastructure teams to deliver reliable and impactful solutions.

Who you are

We're looking for people who meet the minimum qualifications for this role. The preferred qualifications are great to have, but are not mandatory.

Minimum qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including experience in technical leadership roles.

• Proven experience architecting and scaling backend systems and APIs in production.

• Strong computer science fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.

• Expertise in at least one backend language (e.g., Java, Kotlin, Go, Python).

• Deep understanding of REST API design and modern backend frameworks (e.g., Spring Boot).
  Experience with cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS, GCP) and container orchestration tools like Kubernetes.

• Strong commitment to code quality, reliability, and performance.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience leading cross-team initiatives and influencing technical direction at a system-wide level.

• Proficiency in observability and monitoring tools (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk).

• Familiarity with security and compliance considerations in the financial services domain.

• A passion for mentoring and helping others grow.

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 email address. Please apply only through 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.