Staff Software Engineer, Productivity

About the role

The role is based in Seattle, US.

Responsibilities

• Lead the planning, design, and implementation of the Airwallex engineering productivity system, defining domain-level technical roadmaps and owning their delivery end-to-end.
• Work with feature teams to deeply understand the engineering process and subsequent development directions, complete productivity needs analysis, architecture design, and core function development, and be able to grasp the design of complex systems to ensure the quality of complex architecture.
• Design and develop components based on the company's microservice framework, ensuring scalable, reliable infrastructure services including messaging platforms, observability systems, and workflow automation tools that serve all engineering teams at Airwallex.
• Define and drive the AI-powered developer productivity strategy: evaluate, prototype, and deploy AI/ML-powered solutions (e.g., AI-assisted code review, automated test generation, intelligent build optimization, agent based root cause analysis) to streamline developer workflows and improve code quality across the engineering organization.
• Optimize CI/CD pipelines at scale: architect and continuously enhance Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment pipelines to improve software delivery efficiency, reduce build times, and increase deployment frequency across Airwallex's global engineering organization.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship: review RFCs and provide deep architectural insights, establish best practices and design patterns, mentor senior and junior engineers, and raise the engineering quality bar across the Infrastructure & Productivity domain.
• Champion quality gate enforcement (80% UT/IT coverage) and change management standards.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with domain engineering teams: partner with engineers, SREs, and stakeholders across Airwallex to identify productivity bottlenecks, gather requirements, and deliver tooling solutions that measurably improve the developer experience. Use data-driven metrics (e.g., build times, deployment frequency, developer satisfaction) to guide improvements and prioritize investments.

Requirements

• Familiar with common design patterns, with experience in design and development of large-scale distributed, high concurrency, high load, high availability systems.
• Mastery of various common server technologies, which can optimize service response and data query, ensure various service quality, and solve the problems of high concurrency and high availability.
• Strong proficiency in backend programming languages such as Python, Java, Go, Kotlin, Rust, or Node.js and their corresponding frameworks.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated experience building or maintaining CI/CD pipelines, developer tooling, or platform infrastructure at scale.
• Track record of technical leadership, architectural decision-making, and mentoring across teams.
• Infrastructure and cloud expertise: hands-on experience with cloud services (AWS, GCP, or Aliyun) and infrastructure management tools (Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker).
• Strong system design skills with the ability to define and own the technological strategy for a team or domain, making sound architectural decisions that balance performance, scalability, maintainability, and cost.
• Demonstrated ability to review RFCs and provide deep insights into best-of-class designs.

Qualifications

• Experience leveraging AI/ML tools or LLM integration to enhance developer workflows, automate code review, or accelerate engineering productivity.
• Familiarity with AI-powered development tools (e.g., Cursor, Copilot) and a perspective on how AI will transform developer productivity.
• Experience with observability and monitoring tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, or ELK stack, and a track record of operating production infrastructure with strong incident response practices.
• Solid understanding of messaging systems (e.g., Kafka), data streaming, container orchestration, and microservices architecture.
• Demonstrated ability to move fast and grow in dynamic, collaborative, and ambiguous environments, with experience successfully proposing new solutions across a landscape of diverse decision makers.
• Experience in a platform engineering or developer experience role at a technology or fintech company, with a data-driven approach to measuring and improving developer productivity (e.g., tracking build times, deployment frequency, DORA metrics, or developer NPS).
• Experience with build systems (e.g., Bazel, Gradle) or internal developer portals is a plus.