Senior Backend Engineer, Financial Markets

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and own backend services for FX pricing, execution, and risk management, focusing on performance and reliability.
• Contribute to the evolution of FX platform architecture using microservices, event-driven workflows, Kafka, gRPC, and SQL/NoSQL datastores.
• Implement robust controls for pricing, limits, risk, reconciliation, and monitoring to ensure system predictability.
• Work end-to-end on features, from requirements and solution design to implementation, automated testing, and deployment.
• Collaborate with Product, Treasury, Risk, and Data teams to design observable and backward-compatible APIs and data contracts.
• Instrument services with metrics, logs, and tracing to drive capacity planning and incident resolution.
• Participate in code reviews, technical design discussions, and on-call rotations to ensure high availability.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience building and operating backend systems in production.
• Strong programming experience in JVM languages (e.g., Kotlin, Java).
• Solid understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including concurrency, data consistency, and failure modes.
• Experience designing REST and/or gRPC APIs and working with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL) or key-value stores.
• Proficiency with event-driven architectures and message brokers such as Kafka.
• Strong focus on software quality through unit, integration, and contract testing, and familiarity with CI/CD pipelines.
• Good grasp of observability tools, including metrics, logging, and tracing.
• Clear written and verbal communication skills for working in a fast-paced, cross-functional environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in financial services, specifically within FX pricing, execution, or risk management.

About the Company

Airwallex is a unified payments and financial platform for global businesses. Powered by proprietary infrastructure and software, we empower over 200,000 businesses worldwide—including Brex, Rippling, and Qantas—to manage business accounts, payments, spend management, and treasury at a global scale. Founded in Melbourne, we have a global team of over 2,200 people across 26 offices.