--- title: 'Engineering Director, Agentic AI Data Platform at Airwallex' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/engineering-director-agentic-ai-data-platform-airwallex-united-states-san-a5w5b86zqfq1' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-11' --- # Engineering Director, Agentic AI Data Platform at Airwallex - **Company:** [Airwallex](https://feeny.ai/companies/airwallex) - **Location:** United States / San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-11-05 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-11 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/airwallex/23a418be-f7a0-499f-abd7-b942fd026209 ## Job description ## 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 Director of Data Platform Engineering, you'll lead the team responsible for the data backbone of our financial systems. You'll 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. - 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, optimising 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 optimisation 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. You'll work from our San Francisco office three days a week. ## What we're looking for Essentials - 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 modelling, 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 optimising 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. ## Preferred - Experience building data platforms for financial systems, accounting, payments, or other highly regulated products. - Experience applying AI-assisted engineering practices in production environments. You'll thrive here if - You're comfortable owning the roadmap yourself. - You're comfortable making decisions with incomplete information and moving quickly anyway. - You want colleagues who challenge your thinking, not just complement your workload. - You connect dots across functions and hold the big picture without losing grip on the details. - You simplify complexity rather than hiding behind it. Learn more about your team T:0's mission is to make finance run itself. We're building an AI-native accounting platform that closes the books, reconciles, and reports continuously, so founders can stop managing their finances and start using them to run the business. The hard part isn't adding AI to accounting. It's making AI you can trust with the books. We use AI to understand how a business works, then run the actual accounting on strict, checkable rules, and no black box deciding the numbers. That's why customers pick us over both the legacy tools they've outgrown and the AI wrappers they don't trust. And bookkeeping is just the start: we're building toward a full financial operating system for how companies account, plan, and operate. The team is small, elite, and builder-focused, led by operators with a track record of shipping AI products at scale. We sit inside Airwallex, which means startup speed with a scaled company's infrastructure, distribution, and capital behind us. You'll work directly from real customer pain, own outcomes end to end, and ship fast. 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](http://airwallex.com) email address. Please apply only through [careers.airwallex.com](http://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. ## About Airwallex ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Airwallex is a financial technology company building a unified global payments and banking platform that helps businesses manage cross-border payments, treasury, spend, and financial operations through proprietary infrastructure, software, and AI. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series G) - **Headquarters**: Dual headquarters in Singapore and San Francisco, USA; founded in Melbourne, Australia - **Founded**: 2015 - **Founders**: Jack Zhang (CEO), Lucy Liu, Max Li, Xijing Dai, and Ron Li ## Core Business - Primary industry: Financial Services / Payments / Fintech Infrastructure - Target customers: B2B, primarily serving SMBs, scaling enterprises, digital platforms, and marketplaces globally - Mission or purpose statement: "Build the future of global banking" — they aim to replace legacy, fragmented banking systems with a borderless, intelligent, real-time financial operating system for modern businesses. ## Products & Services - **[Business Accounts]**: Multi-currency global accounts to receive, hold, and manage funds in 20+ currencies, with local account details for key markets. - **[Payments]**: Global payment acceptance via 160+ local payment methods, low-code checkout, and programmatic payout capabilities to 200+ countries. - **[Spend / Corporate Cards]**: Multi-currency corporate and employee cards with customisable spend controls, designed for global teams. - **[Expense Management]**: A platform to track, control, and reconcile global business expenses, including employee reimbursements. - **[Billing & Subscription Management]**: A billing platform for usage-based and subscription pricing models, supporting AI companies and complex revenue workflows. - **[Platform APIs]**: API-first infrastructure enabling businesses to embed financial services (accounts, payments, FX, card issuing) into their own products. - **[FX & Treasury]**: Interbank foreign exchange rates and tools to intelligently manage currency risk across markets. ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: US$11 billion (latest valuation in 2025, following a fresh investment round). - **Key Metric**: US$1.8 billion in total funding raised; Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) surpassed US$1 billion by 2025. - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Series G investors include prominent global venture capital firms (specific names not listed in source but backed by top-tier VCs); serves over 200,000 businesses including TikTok, Brex, Rippling, Navan, Qantas, and SHEIN. - **Growth Signals**: - US$287 billion in global payments processed (USD). - 92% of transfers settled same-day, 50% processed instantly. - Over 85 financial licenses and registrations globally. - Team of ~2,300 people across 27 offices internationally. - Dual-headquarters model (Singapore + San Francisco) adopted in 2025 to support next phase of growth. ## Competitive Advantages - Proprietary, API-first infrastructure built from scratch (not riding legacy banking rails), enabling faster, cheaper, and more transparent cross-border transactions. - Unified platform combining banking, payments, spend management, billing, and FX — reducing the need for multiple vendors. - Deep AI integration across the platform to automate financial operations and provide intelligent insights. - Extensive regulatory licensing (85+ licenses) across major markets, creating a high barrier to entry. - Strong network effects: serves both direct businesses and platforms/marketplaces that embed Airwallex into their offerings. ## Strategic Focus - Continue scaling the platform to support the rapid growth of AI-native companies and usage-based business models (highlighted by the launch of their global billing platform). - Expand the dual-headquarters presence to tap into the largest tech talent markets (San Francisco and Singapore). - Invest heavily in AI to build "interconnected, intelligent financial systems where money, data, and decisions move together." - Deepen product capabilities to automate financial operations end-to-end for global businesses. ## Why Work Here - High-growth, ambitious environment: described as "the most ambitious work of your career" by the company; founded in 2015 and already processing $287B in payments. - Global impact and scale: work on infrastructure used by 200,000+ businesses, from startups to enterprises like TikTok and SHEIN. - Hybrid/office culture: 27 offices globally (Melbourne, Singapore, San Francisco, London, Shanghai, Amsterdam, and more) offering opportunities to work across teams and locations. - Engineering-driven culture: heavy emphasis on building proprietary technology, AI, and developer-first products. - Notable perks: opportunity to work on a modern financial stack, exposure to cutting-edge AI/Fintech intersection, and a diverse, international team of "2,200 of the brightest and most innovative people in tech." ## Sources 1. [airwallex.com - Who We Are](https://www.airwallex.com/en-eu/who-we-are) 2. [airwallex.com - Global Platform](https://www.airwallex.com/global) 3. [careers.airwallex.com](https://careers.airwallex.com/) 4. [LinkedIn - Airwallex](https://www.linkedin.com/company/airwallex) 5. 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