Engineering Lead, Scale Platform

About the Team

The Scale Team at Airwallex is at the heart of our mission, specializing in delivering innovative embedded finance products, toolings, and solutions tailored for customers. As we expand our footprint globally, we're looking for passionate Senior Software Engineers (both Backend and Frontend) to join our dynamic team. This is a unique opportunity to collaborate closely with product managers and designers globally, building products that not only meet but exceed our customers expectations.

What you'll do

As an Engineering Lead, Scale Platform, you will lead one or more teams responsible for building and operating critical components of the Scale platform. This role combines people leadership, technical direction, and delivery ownership.

You will have direct reports and are accountable for team health, execution, and long-term technical quality. While you remain technically credible and hands-on at an architectural level, your primary focus is enabling teams to do their best work rather than being the primary individual contributor.

This role is based in Singapore.

Responsibilities:

People leadership and team development

• Manage, coach, and grow a team of engineers through regular feedback, performance management, and career development.

• Build a strong engineering culture focused on ownership, quality, and continuous improvement.

• Support hiring and onboarding to scale the team sustainably.

Technical leadership and delivery

• Provide technical direction and architectural guidance for high-impact transaction processing systems.

• Partner with senior engineers and staff engineers to design scalable, resilient solutions.

• Ensure high standards for system design, code quality, testing, and operational excellence.

Platform and infrastructure ownership

• Guide the evolution of application and platform infrastructure to reduce operational overhead and improve developer productivity.

• Drive improvements across reliability, observability, security, and cost efficiency.

Strategic collaboration

• Work closely with product, operations, and other engineering leaders to align execution with business priorities.

• Evaluate new technologies and patterns, and make pragmatic decisions that balance innovation with stability.

Who you are

We are looking for senior engineers with deep technical expertise and a strong track record of impact as a tech lead.

Minimum qualifications:

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 1+ years in a people leadership role managing engineers directly.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.

• Strong background in modern backend development using languages such as Java, Kotlin, Go, or Python.

• Proven experience designing and delivering large-scale, distributed, production systems.

• Solid understanding of computer science fundamentals and object-oriented design principles.

• Hands-on experience with event-driven and streaming architectures, for example Kafka.

• Experience designing and operating RESTful APIs at scale.

• Cloud experience with GCP (preferred) or AWS, including containerized workloads using Docker and Kubernetes.

• Familiarity with observability and operational tooling such as Splunk, Grafana, and Prometheus.

• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and lead the execution of technical and delivery strategy.

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.

• Prior experience leading teams responsible for high-availability, low-latency systems.