Engineering Lead, Payments Platform

About Airwallex

Airwallex is the only unified payments and financial platform for global businesses. Powered by our unique combination of proprietary infrastructure and software, we empower over 200,000 businesses worldwide – including Brex, Rippling, Navan, Qantas, SHEIN and many more – with fully integrated solutions to manage everything from business accounts, payments, spend management and treasury, to embedded finance at a global scale.

Proudly founded in Melbourne, we have a team of over 2,200 of the brightest and most innovative people in tech across 26 offices around the globe. Valued at US$8 billion and backed by world-leading investors including T. Rowe Price, Visa, Mastercard, Robinhood Ventures, Sequoia, Salesforce Ventures, DST Global, and Lone Pine Capital, Airwallex is leading the charge in building the global payments and financial platform of the future. If you’re ready to do the most ambitious work of your career, join us.

Attributes We Value

We hire successful builders with founder-like energy who want real impact, accelerated learning, and true ownership. You bring strong role-related expertise and sharp thinking, and you’re motivated by our mission and operating principles. You move fast with good judgment, dig deep with curiosity, and make decisions from first principles, balancing speed and rigor.

You're humble and collaborative; turn zero‑to‑one ideas into real products, and you “get stuff done” end-to-end. You use AI to work smarter and solve problems faster. Here, you’ll tackle complex, high‑visibility problems with exceptional teammates and grow your career as we build the future of global banking. If that sounds like you, let’s build what’s next.

About the team

The Payments team spans China, the Netherlands, and Singapore, embracing a rich tapestry of cultures and perspectives.
Our mission is to simplify the complexities of payments for businesses by designing solutions that seamlessly integrate into their workflows, enhancing efficiency and driving customer conversion rates. Within our diverse and dynamic team, you'll find yourself at the intersection of innovation and practicality, where every contribution is essential in making payment processes effortless.
Joining us means becoming part of a global community of engineers leading the charge in reshaping the payments landscape while actively contributing to the operational success of businesses worldwide. 

What you’ll do

As an Engineering lead, you will be responsible for working on a range of exciting initiatives across our international payments platform. The role includes both people & technical responsibilities, and you’ll be responsible for both the product delivery & overall health of the Engineering Team.
We strongly value your experience in building, designing and engineering payment systems (gateway, acquiring, issuing or equivalent). If you don’t have them already, you will learn all the intricacies of the Visa and Mastercard payment platforms. You will work closely with the payments product team and will be given the opportunity to interact with the partners engineering teams when required. As part of our core acquiring payment team you are building the next generation Payment Acceptance infrastructure, and Merchant needs are always top of mind.

This role is based in Amsterdam.

Responsibilities:

• Lead a team of engineers, set goals and development targets for the engineers within the team and support the team with feedback and development plans as they progress

• Work closely with product managers and key stakeholders to define product roadmap, prioritize projects and ship incrementally to production

• Develop various REST services and integration components within a backend microservices architecture, connecting with our React frontend

• Conduct architectural reviews for current and upcoming solutions

• Address tech debt, and enhance operational effectiveness such as MTTD and MTTR

• Contribute to the hiring, training and development of the engineers within the managed team

Who you are

We're looking for people who meet the minimum qualifications for this role. The preferred qualifications are great to have, but are not mandatory.

Minimum qualifications:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with a focus on low latency, distributed systems

• At least one year experience in managing teams

• Strong computer science fundamentals. While we do not mind what language you have most recently been using we are using Java or Kotlin, Spring / Spring Boot

• Experience in designing and building REST APIs; High volume distributed systems; Kafka event streams; Distributed data storage systems (Cassandra, Hazelcast, Oracle Coherence or similar); GCP or AWS (EC2, RDS, ELB, CloudFront, etc), docker and Kubernetes exposure; Javascript / Typescript

• Operational tooling such as New Relic, StatsD, Elk, Datadog, Prometheus

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience in building a payment gateway, acquiring platform or issuing platform

• Experience integrating Local Payment Methods (i.e. iDeal, Klarna, Trustly or equivalent) or Cards (i.e. Visa, Mastercard, etc.)

Applicant Safety Policy: Fraud and Third-Party Recruiters

To protect you from recruitment scams, please be aware that Airwallex will not ask for bank details, sensitive ID numbers (i.e. passport), or any form of payment during the application or interview process. All official communication will come from an @airwallex.com email address. Please apply only through careers.airwallex.com or our official LinkedIn page.

Airwallex does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firms/recruiters. Airwallex will not pay any fees to search firms/recruiters if a candidate is submitted by a search firm/recruiter unless an agreement has been entered into with respect to specific open position(s). Search firms/recruiters submitting resumes to Airwallex on an unsolicited basis shall be deemed to accept this condition, regardless of any other provision to the contrary.

Equal opportunity

Airwallex is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and anyone seeking employment at Airwallex is considered based on merit, qualifications, competence and talent. We don’t regard color, religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, ancestry, citizenship, sex, marital or family status, disability, gender, or any other legally protected status when making our hiring decisions. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.