Engineering Manager, Risk

AIRWALLEX (SINGAPORE) PTE. LTD.; Singapore; On-site; SGD 100,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

A global financial technology firm based in Singapore is looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the development of real-time detection systems. The role requires 8+ years in back-end engineering and 4+ years in management, with strong proficiency in Java and experience in distributed systems. You will be responsible for shaping architecture, driving team performance, and ensuring the security of products. This position offers leadership opportunities and the ability to work with cutting-edge technologies.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in back-end engineering with 4+ years in engineering management.
• Proficiency in Java, including multi-threading and high-concurrency patterns.
• Deep experience with distributed systems and high-availability architectures.

Responsibilities

• Own strategy and delivery of real-time detection systems.
• Provide leadership for a fraud and risk platform.
• Build and scale a high-performing engineering organization.

Skills

Back-end engineering

Java

Distributed systems

Docker

Kubernetes

Leadership

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Spring / Spring Boot

Gradle

Maven

Job description

About the team

The Risk Platform team at Airwallex is responsible for managing the risk for all the products at Airwallex, including GTPN, PA, Issuing, Onboarding, and Account takeover. The risk landscape is constantly changing, and fraudsters are becoming increasingly sophisticated. We are at the forefront of innovation in risk management.

Our mission is to keep Airwallex's products and services safe and secure, and make Airwallex trusted partner for businesses around the world. We use cutting‑edge technologies, such as graph, ML, and LLM, to implement and improve our strategy.

We collaborate with other teams and our customers globally to ensure a holistic approach for risk management.

This role is based in Singapore.

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What you’ll do

As an Engineering Manager, you will own the strategy, roadmap, and delivery of real‑time detection systems that protect customers and revenue at global scale. This is a hands‑on leadership role: you will shape architecture and execution while developing managers and senior engineers to do the best work of their careers.

• Provide strategic leadership for a mission‑critical fraud and risk platform, aligning technical direction and capacity planning with business goals and regulatory requirements.

• Build and scale a high‑performing engineering organization (including managers and senior ICs): set goals, establish career paths, run performance and compensation processes, and cultivate a culture of ownership, inclusion, and excellence.

• Partner closely with Product Management to define the roadmap, prioritize a measurable backlog, and deliver outcomes that improve detection rates, reduce false positives, and minimize chargebacks.

• Serve as the accountable owner for architecture and system quality across services, ensuring reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency for real‑time decisioning under high load.

• Remain hands‑on where it matters: guide designs, review critical code and APIs, and de‑risk complex initiatives with pragmatic technical deep dives.

• Drive design and code quality: institute standards, reviews, and automated checks that raise the bar without slowing teams down.

• Ensure cross‑team collaboration with platform, data, SRE, security, and global engineering teams; remove blockers and foster clear interfaces, SLAs, and ownership.

• Own operational excellence: on‑call readiness, incident response, postmortems, observability, capacity planning, and continuous reliability improvements.

• Lead talent strategy: recruit, onboard, and develop engineers and managers; build diverse teams and succession plans for sustained velocity.

Who you are

We're looking for people who meet the minimum qualifications for this role. The preferred qualifications are great to have, but are not mandatory.

Minimum qualifications

• 8+ years in back‑end engineering with 4+ years in engineering management, including ownership of complex, distributed systems in production.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field.

• Proficiency in Java, including multi‑threading, high‑concurrency patterns, I/O/NIO, and network programming.

• Deep experience with distributed systems and high‑availability, high‑throughput architectures (caching, partitioning, consistency models, and resiliency patterns).

• Proficiency with Spring / Spring Boot, HTTP, TCP/IP, REST, and build tools such as Gradle / Maven.

• Practical experience with Docker and Kubernetes for containerization and orchestration.
  

Preferred Qualifications:

• Leadership across multiple disciplines (e.g., frontend, backend, data/ML, SRE) with managers‑of‑managers scope for Director‑level candidates.

• Working knowledge of machine learning in production and strong data analysis skills to interpret model and rule performance.

• Fluency in English for effective collaboration across global teams and stakeholders.

• Familiarity with modern data and storage technologies: Cassandra, Redis, NoSQL, Hadoop, and streaming systems (e.g., Kafka, Flink, Spark).

• Polyglot engineering with one or more of Kotlin, Scala, Python, Golang.

• Cloud experience with Alibaba Cloud, AWS, or GCP; strong grasp of cloud networking, security, and cost management.

• Background with risk‑specific components: rule engines, feature stores, model serving, A/B testing/experimentation, and real‑time stream processing.

• Awareness of regulatory and security standards relevant to payments (e.g., PCI DSS, SOC 2, data privacy best practices).
  

What Will Set You Apart

• You think in systems: data, models, rules, services, and people—optimizing the whole, not just parts.

• You operate with clarity and urgency, turning ambiguity into decisive roadmaps and measurable results.

• You coach and multiply leaders, not just output; you attract and retain top talent.

• You balance pragmatism and rigor, delivering incrementally while paying down risk and tech debt deliberately.