Senior Manager, Data Platform T0

About Airwallex

Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time intelligent economy. More than 676000 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. Were 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.

Were co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore with more than 2300 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 to see it in full.

About the Team

This team designs intelligent autonomous systems that eliminate financial operations for companies globally. We automate everything from bookkeeping and reconciliation to tax payroll forecasting and document understanding: turning hours of work into seconds. The team blends deep research pedigree with proven industry experience. We operate with high standards are tool-agnostic and expect engineers to own problems end-to-end. We collaborate closely push boundaries responsibly and ship exceptional work quickly. Youll solve unprecedented technical challenges using unique end-to-end financial datasets no one else in the industry has.

About the Role

As a Senior Manager of Data Platform Engineering youll lead the team responsible for the data backbone of our financial systems. Youll set the technical direction for high-volume financial data ingestion our Databricks lakehouse data orchestration canonical financial models and the infrastructure that makes our data platform reliable scalable and increasingly real-time.

Youll combine strong technical judgment with people leadershipbuilding a high-performing engineering organization establishing platform standards driving major migrations and partnering closely with product accounting and platform teams. Youll help shape a data platform where correctness auditability performance and operational excellence are foundational.

This role is based in San Francisco.

What Youll Do

• Lead and grow a high-performing data platform engineering team providing technical direction mentorship career development and clear ownership.
  

• Set the technical strategy for high-volume financial data ingestion across payment processors banks billing systems and ERP/GL platforms with strong guarantees around correctness replayability and recovery.
  

• Lead the evolution of our Databricks lakehouse using Spark Delta Lake Unity Catalog dbt Python and SQL optimizing for scale performance reliability and cost.
  

• Define standards for data contracts schema evolution drift detection data quality and canonical financial models.
  

• Evolve the platform from batch toward near-real-time processing using Kafka CDC micro-batching incremental processing and Dagster orchestration.
  

• Own the architecture of canonical financial models that transform complex source data into consistent financial objects and relationships powering our accounting engine.
  

• Partner with infrastructure and platform teams to build reliable production foundations across observability alerting incident response recovery and operational readiness.
  

• Guide infrastructure strategy across GCP Terraform Kubernetes/GKE Helm GitOps and CI/CD.
  

• Lead migrations from legacy pipelines to the lakehouse with rigorous parity validation staged rollouts and clear rollback strategies.
  

• Drive performance and cost optimization across PostgreSQL Databricks and large-scale data workloads.
  

• Partner with product accounting ML and platform leadership to translate business needs into scalable data platform capabilities.
  

• Set technical direction through architecture reviews design documents engineering standards and long-term platform roadmaps.
  

• Champion AI-assisted engineering practices that improve team velocity while maintaining high standards for code quality testing security and reliability.
  

What Youll Need to Have

• 8 years of experience in data platform backend or infrastructure engineering including significant experience leading engineering teams.
  

• Proven experience managing and developing senior engineers and technical leads and building strong autonomous teams.
  

• Deep expertise in data platforms distributed systems data modeling and production data pipelines.
  

• Strong experience with Python and SQL plus hands-on experience with Spark Databricks Delta Lake dbt and modern lakehouse architectures.
  

• Experience building reliable ingestion systems with large-scale backfills incremental processing checkpointing rate-limit handling idempotency and failure recovery.
  

• Strong understanding of streaming and event-driven architectures including Kafka CDC and micro-batching.
  

• Experience with data orchestration platforms such as Dagster and designing for freshness partitioning and incremental computation.
  

• Experience optimizing PostgreSQL and analytical workloads for performance and cost.
  

• Experience operating production infrastructure on GCP with familiarity with Terraform Kubernetes/GKE Helm GitOps and CI/CD.
  

• Strong understanding of observability reliability engineering and production operations.
  

• Excellent technical communication skills with the ability to influence architecture and engineering decisions across teams.
  

• Experience leading complex technical migrations and balancing long-term platform strategy with near-term business priorities.
  

• Passion for building teams and infrastructure that power reliable scalable mission-critical financial systems.

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 @ email address. Please apply only through 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 dont 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.

Required Experience:

Senior Manager