Staff Software Engineer, Risk

About the role

ABOUT AIRWALLEX

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. Read our operating principles https://www.airwallex.com/en-us/operating-principles to see it in full.

HOW YOU'LL MAKE IMPACT

As a Staff Engineer on the Risk Platform, you’ll be a senior technical leader and hands-on builder. You’ll own critical parts of our real-time detection platform and client-facing risk and fraud management products, setting technical direction and raising the engineering bar while working closely with your manager and cross-functional partners.

- Lead the technical direction of core risk services, including real-time detection, decision engines, and risk tooling, ensuring they’re reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient under high-throughput and low-latency constraints.

- Design and evolve distributed, event-driven risk systems—including microservices, streaming pipelines, feature stores, and model-serving layers—that support global products and regulatory requirements.

- Own complex initiatives end to end, from high-level design and technical specifications through implementation, rollout, and continuous improvement.

- Stay hands-on in code and design, writing high-quality production software primarily in Java and Spring Boot, and leading design reviews, RFCs, and architecture discussions.

- Partner with the Engineering Manager and Product Manager to shape the roadmap, define technical milestones, and translate business and risk objectives into robust engineering solutions.

- Raise the engineering bar across the Risk Platform stack by setting standards for code quality, observability, reliability, security, and performance.

- Improve detection effectiveness by integrating models, rules, and features into production systems, and by designing experimentation and evaluation capabilities with data and ML teams.

- Drive operational excellence through stronger on-call readiness, incident response, postmortems, SLIs/SLOs, capacity planning, and resilience patterns such as graceful degradation, fallbacks, retries, timeouts, and backpressure.

- Mentor and uplevel engineers, including senior individual contributors, through technical coaching, pair programming, design guidance, and feedback.