Senior Data Platform Leader, Real-Time FinTech Infra

Airwallex; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

Airwallex is seeking a Senior Manager of Data Platform Engineering in San Francisco to lead the data backbone of our financial systems. You will shape technical direction for high-volume ingestion, Databricks lakehouse, and data orchestration, while building a high-performing team focused on reliability and near real-time processing.

You will drive migrations, define standards for data models and quality, and collaborate with product, accounting, and platform teams to deliver scalable, auditable

Qualifications

• 8+ years in data platform, backend, or infrastructure engineering with leadership.
• Deep expertise in data platforms, distributed systems, data modeling, and pipelines.
• Strong Python and SQL skills; hands-on Spark, Databricks, Delta Lake, dbt.
• Experience with Kafka, CDC, and lakehouse architectures; production reliability.
• Proven track record building scalable data platforms and leading teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a high-performing data platform engineering team; provide direction and mentorship.
• Set tech strategy for high-volume financial data ingestion across processors, banks, and ERP/GL.
• Evolve Databricks lakehouse with Spark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, dbt; optimize for scale and cost.
• Define data contracts, schema evolution, data quality, and canonical financial models.
• Move from batch to near-real-time processing using Kafka, CDC, and Dagster orchestration.
• Own architecture of canonical financial models powering the accounting engine.
• Partner to build reliable production foundations: observability, alerting, and recovery.
• Guide infrastructure strategy across GCP, Terraform, Kubernetes/GKE, Helm, CI/CD.

Skills

Data platform

Distributed systems

Python

SQL

Spark

Databricks

Delta Lake

dbt

Kafka

Dagster

GCP

Terraform

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Observability

Leadership

Tools

GCP

Kubernetes

Terraform

dbt

Job description

Airwallex is seeking a Senior Manager of Data Platform Engineering in San Francisco to lead the data backbone of our financial systems. You will shape technical direction for high-volume ingestion, Databricks lakehouse, and data orchestration, while building a high-performing team focused on reliability and near real-time processing.

You will drive migrations, define standards for data models and quality, and collaborate with product, accounting, and platform teams to deliver scalable, auditable