Staff Backend Engineer

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate highly reliable, scalable distributed systems that power real-time card transactions
• Lead the design of event-driven systems with strong guarantees around correctness, performance, and resiliency
• Take end-to-end ownership of complex problem spaces, from initial system design through production rollout
• Drive architectural improvements to reduce complexity and improve system operability
• Set a high bar for code quality, testing, observability, and operational readiness
• Influence technical direction across multiple teams through design reviews and RFCs
• Mentor senior engineers and shape engineering best practices across the organization

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with impact as a senior or staff-level individual contributor
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field
• Strong proficiency in backend development using Java, Kotlin, Go, or Python
• Deep experience designing and delivering large-scale, distributed systems in production
• Hands-on experience with event-driven and streaming architectures (e.g., Kafka)
• Proven experience designing and operating RESTful APIs at scale
• Cloud experience with GCP (preferred) or AWS, including Docker and Kubernetes
• Familiarity with observability tooling such as Splunk, Grafana, or Prometheus

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in fintech, payments, or other regulated financial domains
• Deep experience with JVM-based ecosystems, including Java or Kotlin with Spring or Spring Boot

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—with integrated solutions to manage business accounts, payments, spend management, and treasury at a global scale.