Senior Software Engineer - Database

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 Senior Software Engineer on the Database SRE team, you’ll design and build the platforms, automation, and AI-driven tooling that power Airwallex’s database infrastructure. You’ll work across PostgreSQL, Google CloudSQL, Redis, Google Memorystore, and GCP to solve problems at the intersection of database reliability engineering, platform automation, and AI. Your work will directly improve the availability, performance, security, and operational scalability of the data layer supporting Airwallex’s global payments platform.

- Build a unified database observability platform that provides real-time visibility into availability, security posture, reliability metrics, and latency across database instances.

- Design secure MCP (Model Context Protocol) interfaces that enable AI agents to query and interact with production databases while maintaining strict access controls.

- Develop an agentic AI DBA to automate performance tuning, capacity planning, schema review, incident triage, and remediation.

- Create self-service workflows that allow product engineering teams to provision, configure, scale, and manage PostgreSQL and Redis instances with built-in security, compliance, and reliability guardrails.

- Establish database reliability practices across connection pooling, query optimization, backup and recovery, failover, and change management, and participate in on-call rotations for database incidents.

- Partner with product engineers to diagnose performance issues, review schema designs, and improve data modelling and access patterns.

You’ll be based in Seattle and work from the office three days a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

ESSENTIALS

- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with strong proficiency in a backend language such as Python, Go, Java, or Kotlin.

- Deep experience with PostgreSQL, including performance tuning, query optimization, replication, backup and recovery, schema design, and operational best practices.