Head of Engineering, Payments Platform

About the company

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 2,700 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.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end strategy, architecture, and roadmap for Airwallex's Payments Platform, covering payment processing, routing, settlement, reconciliation, and partner integrations across global markets.
• Lead and grow a high-performing engineering organisation by managing and developing Engineering Managers and senior technical talent across multiple squads, while building a culture of ownership, technical excellence, and continuous improvement.
• Provide architectural direction for high-volume, mission-critical payment systems, setting high standards for reliability, observability, security, scalability, and developer productivity.
• Drive execution across multiple concurrent initiatives, balancing short-term delivery with long-term platform investments and operational health.
• Partner with Product, Commercial, Risk, Compliance, and regional engineering leaders to ensure platform capabilities 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, prioritise 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.

Qualifications

• You're comfortable owning the roadmap yourself.
• You own the outcome and you don't wait for permission to fix what's broken.
• You're comfortable making decisions with incomplete information and moving quickly anyway.
• You enjoy working closely with people across multiple countries and time zones as part of one connected, global team