Staff Software Engineer, Productivity

Airwallex; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Collaborative work environment

Opportunities for innovation

Professional development programs

Job summary

A global fintech company in Seattle is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the design and architecture of developer tooling and systems. This role involves optimizing CI/CD pipelines and providing technical leadership to improve engineering productivity. Candidates should have over 8 years of experience in software engineering, strong skills in backend programming, and cloud infrastructure expertise. If you are passionate about enhancing developer experiences and thrive in collaborative environments, join us in shaping the future of financial technology.

Qualifications

• Mastery in backend programming languages like Python, Java, or Node.js.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience.
• Hands-on experience with cloud services.

Responsibilities

• Lead planning and design of developer tooling.
• Optimize CI/CD pipelines at scale.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship.

Skills

Familiarity with common design patterns

Experience with high concurrency systems

Proficiency in backend programming languages

Expertise in cloud services

Strong system design skills

Education

Professional software engineering experience

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

Docker

Job description

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. If that sounds like you, let’s build what’s next.

About the team

Airwallex's Engineering Productivity team sits within the Infrastructure & Productivity division and is on a mission to turn everyday software engineers into superheroes on delivering frictionless engineering and excellent products. The team builds and maintains the internal platforms, tooling, and CI/CD infrastructure that power Airwallex's global engineering organization, serving hundreds of engineers across multiple offices and time zones. You will work alongside a collaborative, globally distributed team of engineers, SREs, and DevOps architects who are passionate about developer experience, automation, and engineering excellence. The team values proactive problem‑solving, a customer mindset toward internal engineering teams, and continuous improvement of the tools and systems that accelerate product delivery. With a modern cloud‑native tech stack and a culture that encourages innovation, this is an opportunity to shape how Airwallex engineers build, test, and ship software at scale.

The Role:

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Productivity team, you will lead the planning, design, and architecture of the developer tooling and infrastructure that enables Airwallex's engineering organization to move faster, ship with higher quality, and operate more efficiently. You will define domain‑level technical strategy and own its delivery, tackling complex challenges at the intersection of AI‑driven automation, CI/CD pipeline engineering, and cloud infrastructure. Working cross‑functionally with engineering teams across the company, you will identify productivity bottlenecks, architect scalable solutions, and set the technical bar for a growing US‑based engineering squad. Your work will directly influence engineering velocity, code quality, and deployment reliability across Airwallex's global platform, compounding across hundreds of engineers worldwide. This role is based in Seattle US.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the planning, design, and implementation of the Airwallex engineering productivity system, defining domain‑level technical roadmaps and owning their delivery end‑to‑end.
• Work with feature teams to deeply understand the engineering process and subsequent development directions, complete productivity needs analysis, architecture design, and core function development, and be able to grasp the design of complex systems to ensure the quality of complex architecture.
• Design and develop components based on the company's microservice framework, ensuring scalable, reliable infrastructure services including messaging platforms, observability systems, and workflow automation tools that serve all engineering teams at Airwallex.
• Define and drive the AI‑powered developer productivity strategy: evaluate, prototype, and deploy AI/ML‑powered solutions (e.g., AI‑assisted code review, automated test generation, intelligent build optimization, agent‑based root cause analysis) to streamline developer workflows and improve code quality across the engineering organization.
• Optimize CI/CD pipelines at scale: architect and continuously enhance Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment pipelines to improve software delivery efficiency, reduce build times, and increase deployment frequency across Airwallex's global engineering organization.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship: review RFCs and provide deep architectural insights, establish best practices and design patterns, mentor senior and junior engineers, and raise the engineering quality bar across the Infrastructure & Productivity domain. Champion quality gate enforcement (80% UT/IT coverage) and change management standards.
• Collaborate cross‑functionally with domain engineering teams: partner with engineers, SREs, and stakeholders across Airwallex to identify productivity bottlenecks, gather requirements, and deliver tooling solutions that measurably improve the developer experience. Use data‑driven metrics (e.g., build times, deployment frequency, developer satisfaction) to guide improvements and prioritize investments.

Minimum qualifications：

• Familiar with common design patterns, with experience in design and development of large‑scale distributed, high concurrency, high load, high availability systems.
• Mastery of various common server technologies, which can optimize service response and data query, ensure various service quality, and solve the problems of high concurrency and high availability.
• Strong proficiency in backend programming languages such as Python, Java, Go, Kotlin, Rust, or Node.js and their corresponding frameworks.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated experience building or maintaining CI/CD pipelines, developer tooling, or platform infrastructure at scale. Track record of technical leadership, architectural decision‑making, and mentoring across teams.
• Infrastructure and cloud expertise: hands‑on experience with cloud services (AWS, GCP, or Aliyun) and infrastructure management tools (Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker).
• Strong system design skills with the ability to define and own the technological strategy for a team or domain, making sound architectural decisions that balance performance, scalability, maintainability, and cost. Demonstrated ability to review RFCs and provide deep insights into best‑of‑class designs.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience leveraging AI/ML tools or LLM integration to enhance developer workflows, automate code review, or accelerate engineering productivity. Familiarity with AI‑powered development tools (e.g., Cursor, Copilot) and a perspective on how AI will transform developer productivity engineering is a plus.
• Experience with observability and monitoring tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, or ELK stack, and a track record of operating production infrastructure with strong incident response practices. Solid understanding of messaging systems (e.g., Kafka), data streaming, container orchestration, and microservices architecture.
• Demonstrated ability to move fast and grow in dynamic, collaborative, and ambiguous environments, with experience successfully proposing new solutions across a landscape of diverse decision makers. This aligns with Airwallex's Operating Principles of "Move Fast with Conviction" and "Curious."
• Experience in a platform engineering or developer experience role at a technology or fintech company, with a data‑driven approach to measuring and improving developer productivity (e.g., tracking build times, deployment frequency, DORA metrics, or developer NPS). Experience with build systems (e.g., Bazel, Gradle) or internal developer portals is a plus.

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.