Staff Software Engineer, Payments

Airwallex; Netherlands; On-site; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Airwallex is seeking a senior backend engineer to own the technical direction of the Payments Platform and lead architecture decisions. You will build scalable backend services, REST APIs, and event-driven components within a microservices architecture, collaborating with cross-functional teams to translate merchant needs into robust technical solutions.

You will drive quality, testing, observability and reliability while mentoring engineers and shaping the roadmap for globally distributed

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering with staff-level leadership.
• Experience designing high-volume distributed systems, preferably in payments/fintech.
• Hands-on with Java or Kotlin and Spring/Spring Boot.
• Experience with REST APIs, Kafka, and distributed data stores.
• Proficient with cloud platforms (GCP/AWS), Docker and Kubernetes.
• Strong observability and tooling knowledge.
• Able to lead projects end-to-end with quality and maintainability.

Responsibilities

• Define technical direction for Airwallex's Payments Platform and lead architecture decisions.
• Build scalable backend services, REST APIs and event-driven components within a microservices architecture.
• Collaborate with product, business, infrastructure and external engineering teams to translate merchant needs into technical solutions.
• Improve code quality, testing, observability, reliability and mentorship across teams.

Skills

Java/Kotlin

Spring

REST APIs

Kafka

Distributed DB

Cloud (GCP/AWS)

Docker

Kubernetes

Observability

Leadership

Communication

Job description

About Airwallex

About Airwallex Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. More than 675,000 businesses, including McLaren Racing, Qantas, SHEIN, and TikTok, use us, directly or through our platform partners, to run their financial operations or build and monetize financial products of their own. We started in Melbourne in 2015 to build the infrastructure global commerce runs on. We're the regulated backbone behind global payments: not by accident, but by design. A decade plus, 85+ licenses, and a financial infrastructure spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. We're co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, with more than 2,700 people across 27 offices. We hire builders with founder-level energy, people who move fast with good judgment, dig in with real curiosity, and make calls from first principles rather than waiting to be told what to do. Read our operating principles to see it in full.

How you'll make impact

You’ll define the technical direction for Airwallex's Payments Platform, lead architecture decisions and build highly reliable, high-volume distributed systems that directly affect merchant experience and business outcomes. You’ll design and build scalable backend services, REST APIs, event-driven systems and integration components within a microservices architecture, connecting with our React frontend. You’ll drive complex initiatives across payment gateways, acquiring, issuing, card networks and local payment methods, while partnering with product, business, infrastructure and external engineering teams to turn merchant needs into technical solutions. You’ll raise the engineering bar through architectural reviews, thoughtful approaches to technical debt, strong design practices, code quality, testing, observability, reliability and mentorship.

What we’re looking for

Essentials

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including Staff-level technical leadership or equivalent ownership of complex backend systems.
• Strong experience designing and operating high-volume distributed systems, preferably in payments, fintech, commerce or financial infrastructure.
• Recent hands-on experience with Java or Kotlin and Spring or Spring Boot.
• Expert experience building REST APIs, backend microservices, Kafka-based event streams and distributed data stores such as Cassandra, Hazelcast, Oracle Coherence or similar.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as GCP or AWS, plus Docker and Kubernetes.
• Strong familiarity with observability and operational tooling such as New Relic, StatsD, ELK, Datadog, Prometheus or similar.
• A proven ability to lead projects from concept to production, with a focus on quality, testing, reliability and maintainability.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence across engineering, product and business stakeholders.

Preferred

• Experience building payment gateways, acquiring platforms, issuing platforms or payment acceptance infrastructure.
• Experience integrating major card networks such as Visa and Mastercard.
• Experience with local payment methods such as iDEAL, Klarna, Trustly or similar.
• Familiarity with authorisation, capture, refunds, chargebacks, settlement, reconciliation, fraud, risk or PCI/compliance workflows.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and leading cross-team technical initiatives.

You’ll thrive here if

You're comfortable owning the roadmap yourself. You own the outcome and you don't wait for permission to fix what's broken. You're comfortable with ambiguity. Give you a problem, not a prescription, and you'll run with it. You communicate clearly and directly across cultures, and you're thoughtful about how context shifts meaning across borders. You're comfortable operating across time zones with a globally distributed team, including colleagues based in APAC and EMEA.

Learn more about your team

Payments Platform at Airwallex builds the infrastructure that turns global payment complexity into reliable, scalable payment experiences, helping businesses accept and process money across markets with less friction. The challenge is balancing performance, reliability, local complexity, and commercial outcomes in the same system, where small improvements can materially affect conversion and failures are immediately visible. You'll do well here if you're thoughtful, pragmatic, and motivated by making complex problems feel simple to customers. If you want to build the platform that makes payments work seamlessly for businesses around the world, this is the team at the center of that mission.

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