Engineering Director, Payments Platform

Airwallex is the only unified payments and financial platform for global businesses. Powered by proprietary infrastructure and software, we empower over 250,000 businesses worldwide with fully integrated solutions to manage business accounts, payments, spend management, treasury, and embedded finance at a global scale. Founded in Melbourne, we have a team of over 2,300 innovators across 27 offices globally, backed by leading investors including T. Rowe Price, Visa, Mastercard, and Sequoia.

About The Team

The Payments Platform team at Airwallex transforms global payment complexity into infrastructure that simplifies how businesses accept and move money. We build the platform enabling businesses to embed payments into their workflows, improve conversion, and reduce friction. This work supports a core growth lever for Airwallex: payment experiences that are reliable, scalable, and easy to use. The team tackles the unique challenge of balancing performance, reliability, local complexity, and commercial outcomes within the same system. Small improvements can significantly impact customer experience and conversion, while failures are immediately visible. This environment suits engineers who are thoughtful, pragmatic, and motivated by making complex problems feel simple for customers.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the Payments Platform vision: Own the end-to-end strategy, architecture, and roadmap for Airwallex's Payments Platform—covering payment processing, routing, settlement, reconciliation, and partner integrations—ensuring it scales reliably across global markets.
• Lead and grow a world-class engineering organization: Manage, coach, and develop Engineering Managers and senior technical talent across multiple squads, building a culture of ownership, technical excellence, and continuous improvement while driving sustainable hiring and team growth.
• Drive technical architecture and platform excellence: Provide architectural direction for high-volume, mission-critical payment systems, setting high standards for reliability, observability, security, scalability, and developer productivity across the platform.
• Deliver with speed and operational rigor: Set clear OKRs, manage execution across multiple concurrent initiatives, and hold teams accountable for high-quality outcomes—balancing short-term delivery with long-term platform investments and operational health.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to align technology with business outcomes: Partner closely with Product, Commercial, Risk, Compliance, and regional engineering leaders to ensure platform capabilities directly support Airwallex's growth, customer experience, and regulatory requirements.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with 5+ years in engineering leadership roles.
• Demonstrated experience in people management, including managing Engineering Managers or Engineering Leads, with a track record of building and scaling high-performing teams.
• Strong product thinking and the ability to partner closely with Product Management to define roadmaps, prioritize delivery, and drive business outcomes.
• Deep technical fluency in software architecture and system design, with experience guiding architectural decisions for large-scale, complex distributed systems.
• Proven ability to operate in fast-paced, high-growth environments where incremental improvement, ownership, and speed of execution are valued.
• Experience in fintech, financial services, payments, or a similarly regulated industry where correctness and data integrity are critical.

Pay

Compensation Range: $237K - $407K