Airwallex Limited

Senior Manager, Data Platform - T0

Airwallex Limited • $150K — $180K *
Finance & Insurance
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 8+ years of experience in data platform, backend, or infrastructure engineering, with a focus on team leadership.
  • Proven track record in managing and developing senior engineers and building autonomous teams.
  • Deep expertise in data platforms, distributed systems, and production data pipelines.
  • Strong proficiency in Python and SQL, with hands-on experience in Spark, Databricks, and modern lakehouse architectures.
  • Experience in building reliable ingestion systems with large-scale backfills and failure recovery mechanisms.
  • Strong understanding of streaming architectures, including Kafka and micro-batching.
  • Experience with data orchestration platforms like Dagster and optimizing PostgreSQL workloads.

Responsibilities

  • Lead and develop a high-performing data platform engineering team, providing mentorship and clear ownership.
  • Set technical strategy for high-volume financial data ingestion with a focus on correctness and recovery.
  • Evolve the Databricks lakehouse architecture for optimal performance and reliability.
  • Define standards for data contracts, schema evolution, and data quality.
  • Transition the platform from batch to near-real-time processing using modern orchestration techniques.
  • Own the architecture of canonical financial models for consistent data transformation.
  • Collaborate with infrastructure teams to ensure reliable production foundations.

Benefits

  • Opportunity to work on cutting-edge financial automation technology.
  • Collaborative and innovative team environment with a focus on high standards.
  • Access to unique, end-to-end financial datasets not available elsewhere in the industry.
  • Potential for career growth and development in a high-performing engineering organization.
Full Job Description
About the Team

This team designs intelligent, autonomous systems that eliminate financial operations for companies globally. We automate everything from bookkeeping and reconciliation to tax, payroll, forecasting, and document understanding: turning hours of work into seconds. The team blends deep research pedigree with proven industry experience. We operate with high standards, are tool-agnostic, and expect engineers to own problems end-to-end. We collaborate closely, push boundaries responsibly, and ship exceptional work quickly. You'll solve unprecedented technical challenges using unique, end-to-end financial datasets no one else in the industry has.

About the Role

As a Senior Manager 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.

You'll combine strong technical judgment with people leadership-building a high-performing engineering organization, establishing platform standards, driving major migrations, and partnering closely with product, accounting, and platform teams. You'll help shape a data platform where correctness, auditability, performance, and operational excellence are foundational.

This role is based in San Francisco.

What You'll Do
  • 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, optimizing 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 optimization 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.
What You'll Need to Have
  • 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 modeling, 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 optimizing 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.
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 [redacted].com email address. Please apply only through 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.

About Airwallex Limited

Airwallex is a financial technology company that provides cross-border payment solutions for businesses. The company was founded in 2015 by a group of entrepreneurs from Australia and China. Airwallex's platform allows businesses to make and receive payments in multiple currencies at competitive exchange rates. The company has raised over $400 million in funding to date and has offices in several countries, including Australia, China, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
Learn more about Airwallex Limited
Size
800 employees
Industry
Founded
2015

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