Engineering Manager, Data Knowledge Platform

Airwallex; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 200,000 - 288,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) plan

20 paid vacation days

12 paid holidays

Job summary

Airwallex is seeking a Manager for Data Platform in San Francisco. This role oversees cross-functional data initiatives, ensuring alignment with business objectives. Candidates should have 8+ years in data/software engineering and leadership experience.

The successful candidate will provide technical leadership, oversee a scalable data infrastructure, and mentor engineering teams, driving significant business outcomes.

Qualifications

• Minimum of 8 years in data or software engineering, with at least 3 years in management.
• Experience in managing and scaling engineering teams of 10+.
• Strong command of data and software engineering focusing on architecture.

Responsibilities

• Oversee cross-functional initiatives impacting entire data ecosystem.
• Define technical roadmap for real-time data analysis.
• Scale engineering teams and establish best practices.

Skills

Data engineering

Leadership

Software engineering

Apache Spark

Event streaming

Mentoring

Tools

Kafka

Databricks

ElasticSearch

Job description

Location

US - San Francisco

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

Hybrid

Department

Engineering, Knowledge Platform

Compensation

• Base $200K – $288K • Offers Equity • Offers Bonus

Airwallex promotes fair compensation practices in accordance with applicable federal, state, and local law.

These expected base pay ranges are based on information at the time this post was generated and represent the company’s good faith minimum and maximum ranges for this role at the time of posting.

The actual compensation offered to a candidate will be dependent upon multiple factors, including but not limited to relevant experience, skills and other qualifications, geographic location as noted, internal equity, and other external market factors.

Certain roles may be eligible for other compensation including, but not limited to, annual bonuses, commissions, RSUs, or other forms of compensation in addition to the established salary range.

Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and work location. US-based employees are eligible to participate in medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan, short-term and long-term disability, basic life insurance, and well-being benefits. US-based employees also receive 20 paid days of vacation and 12 paid days of company holidays in a calendar year.

Further details about our compensation and benefits package are available upon request by contacting our Talent Acquisition team.

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.

About the team

The Knowledge Platform team is at the heart of our company's data and AI strategy. We are building the foundational infrastructure that empowers the entire company to leverage data, AI, and ML into business impact. We accomplish this by creating platforms that handle the entire data and AI/ML lifecycle, simplifying the interface while providing proper safety and governance. This includes managing our data infrastructure (Databricks, Spark, Kafka, etc.), the technology to serve that data to our users (RAG, MCP, etc.), and the platform to host and govern these AI/ML models.

In 2026, our team’s overarching mission is to evolve our full data ecosystem—encompassing both platform and models—into a fully AI agent‑ready infrastructure; we will empower customers to engage directly with the data platform to extract actionable value through capabilities like analytics and natural language querying, while also upgrading the platform to deliver robust, real‑time performance for instant, data‑driven decision‑making.

What you’ll do

As the Manager for Data Platform, you will oversee large‑scale, cross‑functional initiatives that impact the entire data ecosystem. You will be responsible for defining the multi‑year vision and technical roadmap for all real‑time data analysis and serving needs, ensuring they are aligned with broader business objectives and product goals. A key aspect of your role will also include scaling the engineering teams, defining new roles, and establishing best practices for communication and collaboration across multiple sub‑teams.

This role is based in San Francisco.

Responsibilities

• Provide visionary technical leadership and define a clear 1‑3 year strategic roadmap for the Realtime Data Platform.
• Lead the multi‑year effort to modernize our core data platform, introducing real‑time analytical processing at petabyte scale.
• Partner with product teams to enable new data‑driven features, such as AI‑powered applications or real‑time dashboards, by ensuring the underlying platform capabilities are in place.
• Successfully scale and structure the engineering teams, including hiring new talent and mentoring managers and senior individual contributors.
• Cultivate and maintain strong relationships with product and other engineering teams, serving as a trusted technical advisor on all things Data and AI.

Who you are

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

Minimum qualification

• A minimum of 8 years of experience in data or software engineering, with at least 3 years in a leadership or management role.
• Proven experience successfully managing and scaling an engineering team of 10+ people, including managers and senior individual contributors.
• Demonstrated ability to define and execute a technical strategy that led to a significant business outcome or operational improvement.
• Strong command of the data and software engineering domains, with a focus on architecture and strategy.
• Deep understanding of distributed data processing technologies (e.g., Apache Spark, Databricks) and event streaming (e.g., Kafka).
• Solid knowledge of modern data storage and serving technologies, such as CubeJS, ElasticSearch, and Clickhouse, and more.
• Familiarity with observability tooling such as Splunk, Grafana, and Prometheus.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience within the financial domain.
• Hands‑on design experience in crafting data processing patterns for a modern Lakehouse architecture.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills tailored for diverse audiences (leadership, users, company‑wide).
• Ability to rapidly evaluate various technologies and conduct proof of concepts to drive architecture design.
• Experience thriving in a complex environment.

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.