Engineering Lead/Manager, Risk (Relocate to Singapore)

About the role

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.

This role is based in Singapore.

What You’ll Do

• 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 fraud and risk platform, aligning technical direction and capacity planning with business goals and regulatory requirements.
• Work with Product Managers, Design, Operations, Commercial, and Strategy teams to shape the future of our fraud management products.
• Build and scale a high-performing engineering organization (including managers and senior ICs): set goals, establish career paths, run performance and compensation processes, and cultivate a culture of ownership, inclusion, and excellence.
• Partner closely with Product Managers to define the roadmap, prioritize a measurable backlog, and deliver outcomes that improve detection rates, reduce false positives, and minimize chargebacks.
• Ensure architecture and system quality across services, ensuring reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency for real-time decisioning under high load.
• Guide designs, review critical code and APIs, and de-risk complex initiatives with pragmatic technical deep dives.
• Institute standards, reviews, and automated checks that raise the bar without slowing teams down.
• Drive cross-team collaboration with platform, data, SRE, security, and global engineering teams; remove blockers and foster clear interfaces, SLAs, and ownership.
• Ensure operational excellence: on-call readiness, incident response, postmortems, observability, capacity planning, and continuous reliability improvements.
• Lead talent strategy: recruit, onboard, and develop engineers and managers; build diverse teams and succession plans for sustained velocity.

Who You Are

• Minimum Qualifications: 8+ years in back-end engineering with 2+ years in engineering management, including ownership of complex, distributed systems in production. Risk management or Fintech product engineering experience. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field. Proficiency in Java, including multi-threading, high-concurrency patterns, I/O/NIO, and network programming. Deep experience with distributed systems and high-availability, high-throughput architectures (caching, partitioning, consistency models, and resiliency patterns). Proficiency with Spring / Spring Boot, HTTP, TCP/IP, REST, and build tools such as Gradle / Maven. Practical experience with Docker and Kubernetes for containerization and orchestration.
• Preferred Qualifications: Leadership across multiple disciplines (e.g., frontend, backend, data/ML, SRE) with managers-of-managers scope for Director-level candidates. Working knowledge of machine learning in production and strong data analysis skills to interpret model and rule performance. Fluency in English for effective collaboration across global teams and stakeholders. Familiarity with modern data and storage technologies: Cassandra, Redis, NoSQL, Hadoop, and streaming systems (e.g., Kafka, Flink, Spark). Polyglot engineering with one or more of Kotlin, Scala, Python, Golang. Cloud experience with Alibaba Cloud, AWS, or GCP; strong grasp of cloud networking, security, and cost management. Background with risk-specific components: rule engines, feature stores, model serving, A/B testing/experimentation, and real-time stream processing. Awareness of regulatory and security standards relevant to payments (e.g., PCI DSS, SOC 2, data privacy best practices).

What Will Set You Apart

• You think in systems: data, models, rules, services, and people—optimizing the whole, not just parts.
• You operate with clarity and urgency, turning ambiguity into decisive roadmaps and measurable results.
• You coach and multiply leaders, not just output; you attract and retain top talent.
• You balance pragmatism and rigor, delivering incrementally while paying down risk and tech debt deliberately.

Applicant Safety Policy

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.

Career Opportunities

Airwallex is committed to providing equal opportunities and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.