Data Platform Principal Architect

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

You’ll architect the governed, reusable data, knowledge, and skills layers that power analytics, AI agents, and real-time decision systems across Airwallex. You’ll define scalable patterns for structured datasets, semantic models, business metrics, entity relationships, contextual documentation, analytical workflows, agent-callable tools, and transformation primitives.

- Own the technical execution of regional and global data localisation strategies within Databricks, balancing regulatory requirements with a unified global data model across priority markets.

- Design scalable patterns for governed datasets, semantic models, knowledge artifacts, analytical workflows, agent-callable tools, and transformation primitives.

- Reconcile local compliance constraints with global consistency in data definitions, metrics, and knowledge assets.

- Partner with Data Science, AI Engineering, Product, and Risk teams to support experimentation, high-quality decision-making, and reliable AI-enabled workflows.

- Lead global data modelling efforts, define Agent Interfaces through APIs and tools, and embed automated lineage and quality controls through Governance-as-Code.

- Serve as the primary technical authority as the team’s most senior individual contributor, leading design reviews and mentoring engineers.

You’ll work from our Singapore office five days a week.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Essentials

- 10+ years of experience designing and building large-scale data systems with strong architectural fundamentals.

- Hands-on experience with the Databricks ecosystem, including Unity Catalog and Delta Lake.

- Experience implementing semantic layers or metric stores to enable consistent reporting and analytics.

- Strong understanding of how AI and agent-based systems consume data, with experience building APIs or data services to support them.