Data Platform Principal Architect

About Airwallex Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. More than 676,000 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 2,300 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. 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 We are looking for a Principal Architect who operates at the intersection of platform architecture, customer-facing data products, and AI enablement. This is not a traditional infrastructure role. Your mandate is to architect the governed, reusable data, knowledge, and skill layer that powers analytics, AI agents, and real-time decision systems across the business. As the most senior individual contributor on the team, you will be the primary technical authority responsible for evolving our platform beyond raw data storage into a structured system of three layers: Data Layer: You will design the patterns for governed, well-modeled structured datasets—from transactional records and event streams to dimensional models and feature tables. You will ensure high quality, strong lineage, and regional compliance are "baked in" to the foundation, keeping it clean, trusted, and queryable. Knowledge Layer: You will architect the semantic layer that makes data meaningful to both humans and machines. This includes business metric definitions, entity relationships, and contextual documentation. Your goal is to ensure an analyst or an AI agent can ask "what is our net revenue retention in SEA?" and receive a consistent, trustworthy answer without ever having to reverse-engineer a schema. Skills Layer: You will define the architecture for operationalized capabilities that act on data and knowledge. This includes reusable analytical workflows, agent-callable tools, automated pipelines, and transformation primitives. These are the building blocks that allow AI agents and internal teams to reason and act reliably, rather than just querying data. This role is based in Singapore. Responsibilities： Own the technical execution of regional and global data localisation strategies within the Databricks environment. Design scalable patterns that satisfy strict regulatory requirements while maintaining a unified global data model across priority markets. Reconcile local com