(Senior /Staff) Software Engineer, Cloud Infrastructure

About Airwallex

Airwallex is the only unified payments and financial platform for global businesses. Powered by our unique combination of proprietary infrastructure and software, we empower over 200,000 businesses worldwide – including Brex, Rippling, Navan, Qantas, SHEIN and many more – with fully integrated solutions to manage everything from business accounts, payments, spend management and treasury, to embedded finance at a global scale.

Proudly founded in Melbourne, we have a team of over 2,000 of the brightest and most innovative people in tech across 26 offices around the globe. Valued at US$8 billion and backed by world-leading investors including T. Rowe Price, Visa, Mastercard, Robinhood Ventures, Sequoia, Salesforce Ventures, DST Global, and Lone Pine Capital, Airwallex is leading the charge in building the global payments and financial platform of the future. If you're ready to do the most ambitious work of your career, join us.

Attributes We Value

We hire successful builders with founder-like energy who want real impact, accelerated learning, and true ownership. You bring strong role-related expertise and sharp thinking, and you're motivated by our mission and operating principles. You move fast with good judgment, dig deep with curiosity, and make decisions from first principles, balancing speed and rigor.

You're humble and collaborative; turn zero‑to‑one ideas into real products, and you get stuff done end-to-end. You use AI to work smarter and solve problems faster. Here, you'll tackle complex, high‑visibility problems with exceptional teammates and grow your career as we build the future of global banking. If that sounds like you, let's build what's next.

Keywords: cloud, k8s, istio, controller, operator

Who We Are About the Team:

About The Team

The Airwallex Cloud Infrastructure team is a group of highly skilled, innovative, and collaborative professionals. The team brings together experts in Kubernetes, service mesh, cloud platforms, and core services, all working seamlessly to ensure the highest levels of performance, reliability, and security. We are looking for Software Engineers to join the team to create and maintain a cutting-edge, secure, and scalable infrastructure that supports our cross-border payment solutions.

We build and run the cloud systems that keep Airwallex fast, safe, and always available. Our mission Make sure everything just works—no matter how big we grow.

In this role, you will:

1. Develop Cloud Infrastructure Services: Build scalable and resilient cloud-native infrastructure services and platforms using Kubernetes, Istio, Crossplane, ArgoCD/Rollout/Workflow, and other modern technologies, emphasizing full automation and GitOps best practices.
2. Enhance Infrastructure Platform Reliability and Security: Proactively monitor system health and performance, and implement solutions to address infrastructure issues and security vulnerabilities before they impact customers.
3. Collaborate on Infrastructure Architecture: Partner with senior engineers and cross-functional stakeholders to continuously evolve the infrastructure and technology stack, improving reliability, scalability, and developer experience.
4. Contribute to Incident Response & Operations: Participate in on-call rotations to troubleshoot and resolve infrastructure issues, ensuring minimal downtime and high availability across environments.
5. Integrate Emerging Technologies: Stay ahead of industry trends in AI, Kubernetes, Service Mesh (Istio), Crossplane, GitOps, and cloud platforms. Evaluate and help integrate innovative tools and practices to strengthen the infrastructure ecosystem.

You might be a great fit if you:

1. Distributed Systems Knowledge: Hands-on experience working with distributed systems and understanding the challenges of building scalable, fault-tolerant infrastructure.
2. Kubernetes & Containerization: Familiar with core Kubernetes concepts, with hands-on experience in developing custom controllers/operators.
3. Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Understand core principles of IaC and have working knowledge of tools such as Crossplane, Pulumi, Terraform, or similar.
4. Programming Proficiency: Can write clean, maintainable code in at least one language such as Go, Python, or similar.
5. Problem-Solving Mindset: Take initiative in identifying infrastructure bottlenecks and proposing actionable solutions, with a proactive and analytical approach.
6. Team Collaboration & Communication: Thrive in cross-functional environments, and communicate effectively to align technical decisions with team goals.
7. Educational Background: Hold a Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.

Bonus if you have:

1. Custom Kubernetes Operator Development: Hands-on experience building and maintaining custom Kubernetes controllers or operators to automate infrastructure workflows.
2. Service Mesh Expertise: Familiarity with Istio or other service mesh technologies for traffic management, observability, and security in microservices architectures.
3. GitOps Practices & Tooling: Working knowledge of GitOps principles and tools like ArgoCD or Flux for declarative infrastructure and application delivery.
4. Cloud & Kubernetes Certifications: Possess certifications in Kubernetes (CKA, CKAD) or major cloud platforms such as GCP, AWS, or Azure.
5. Contributions to CNCF Open Source Projects: Active participation in CNCF-affiliated open-source communities.

For senior software engineers, we expect you to have around 6 years or at least 5 years engineering experience. You should be able to demonstrate more in - depth understanding in the complexity of projects and the design of code systems.

For SDE2 engineers, we expect you to have around 3 years or at least 2 years engineering experience. You should be able to solve problems related to coding and system design independently.