Senior Engineering Manager, Issuing Platform

Airwallex; Singapore; On-site; SGD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Airwallex in Singapore is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager, Issuing Platform to lead one or more teams responsible for core issuing systems, including card lifecycle management and high-throughput processing.

You will balance people leadership with technical direction, collaborating with product and operations to improve reliability, observability, and cost efficiency while delivering scalable, compliant financial workflows. This is an in-office role in Singapore, five days a week.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience with at least 4+ years in people leadership.
• Bachelor's degree in CS, SWE, or related field.
• Strong backend development with Java, Kotlin, Go, or Python.
• Experience designing large-scale distributed systems.
• Familiar with event-driven architectures (Kafka).

Responsibilities

• Own team health, execution, and long-term technical quality across teams.
• Lead engineering culture through coaching and hiring.
• Drive technical direction for scalable transaction-processing systems.
• Improve reliability, observability, and cost efficiency across the platform.
• Collaborate with product, operations, and other leaders to align strategy.

Skills

People leadership

Backend development

Distributed systems

Cloud (GCP/AWS)

Docker & Kubernetes

RESTful APIs

Observability tools

Mentoring engineers

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kafka

Spring Boot

GCP or AWS

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

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

As a Senior Engineering Manager, Issuing Platform, you'll lead one or more teams building and operating the core systems behind Airwallex's issuing products, including card lifecycle management, high-throughput transaction processing, and clearance, settlement, and dispute workflows. You'll combine people leadership, technical direction, and delivery ownership to help your teams build reliable, scalable systems for high-stakes financial workflows.

You’ll remain technically credible and engaged at an architectural level while focusing primarily on team health, execution, and long-term technical quality rather than acting as the primary individual contributor. You'll partner with product, operations, senior engineers, and other engineering leaders to improve reliability, observability, security, developer productivity, and cost efficiency across the platform.

• Own team health, execution, and long-term technical quality across one or more engineering teams.

• Build a strong engineering culture through coaching, feedback, performance management, career development, hiring, and onboarding.

• Drive technical direction and architectural guidance for scalable, resilient transaction-processing systems.

• Improve system design, code quality, testing, reliability, observability, security, and operational excellence across the platform.

• Partner with product, operations, senior engineers, and other engineering leaders to align technical and delivery strategy with business priorities.

• Guide pragmatic technology and platform decisions that balance innovation, stability, developer productivity, and cost efficiency.

This is an in-office role — you'll be in our Singapore office five days a week.

What we're looking for

Essentials

• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 4+ 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

• 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.

You’ll thrive here if

• You own the outcome and you don't wait for permission to fix what's broken.

• You're comfortable making decisions with incomplete information and moving quickly anyway.

• You hold yourself to a high standard even when no one is watching. Quality and accountability aren't external expectations, they're internal ones.

• You can advocate hard for a position, then fully support the team's direction once a call is made.

Learn more about your team

The Issuing Platform team at Airwallex own the core systems behind our issuing products: card lifecycle management, high-throughput transaction processing, and the clearance, settlement, and dispute workflows that keep money and data moving accurately. The tension is balancing low-latency, always-on processing with rigorous compliance, resilience, and financial accuracy. You'll thrive here if you're drawn to deep ownership and high-stakes systems, hard operational problems, and think carefully about edge cases and failure modes. If you want to build the infrastructure that makes card issuing reliable and scalable at Airwallex, this is the team at the center of that work.

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 @ airwallex.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.

Equal opportunity

Airwallex is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and anyone seeking employment at Airwallex is considered based on merit, qualifications, competence and talent. We don't regard color, religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, ancestry, citizenship, sex, marital or family status, disability, gender, or any other legally protected status when making our hiring decisions. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.