Senior Software Engineer - Database

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 Airwallex's Database team sits within the Infrastructure division and is responsible for the reliability, performance, security, and automation of Airwallex's database infrastructure — primarily Postgres (Google CloudSQL), Redis (Google Memorystore), Clickhouse and many more. The team's mission is to make databases invisible: product engineers should be able to provision, scale, and operate databases safely without needing to become database experts themselves. Today the team has 4 engineers across Singapore and China. We are expanding to Seattle to build a truly global team and to tackle the next generation of database automation — including AI-powered database operations, self-service platforms, and unified observability. You will join a team that values engineering rigor, automation-first thinking, and a bias toward building tools over performing manual toil. This hybrid role is based in Seattle, WA. What you'll do As a Senior Software Engineer on the Database SRE team, you will design and build the platforms, automation, and AI-driven tooling that power Airwallex's database infrastructure. This is not a traditional DBA role — you are an engineer who builds systems that automate database operations at scale. You'll work across Postgres (CloudSQL) and Redis (Memorystore) on GCP, tackling challenges at the intersection of database reliability engineering, platform automation, and AI. Your work will directly impact the availability, performance, and security of the data layer that underpins Airwallex's global payments platform. Responsibilities: Build a unified database observability platform: Design and implement an "eagle-eye" view across all database instances, providing real-time visibility into availability, security posture, reliability metrics, and latency — enabling proactive issue detection before incidents occur. Build MCP (Model Context Protocol) for safe AI agent access: Design and implement secure interfaces that allow AI agents to safely query and interact with production databases, enabling the next generation of AI-powered internal tooling while maintaining strict security and access control. Build an Agentic AI DBA: Develop AI-powered automation that handles routine DBA tasks — performance tuning, capacity planning, schema review, incident triage, and remediation — reducing manual toil and enabling the team to scale operations without scaling headcount. Build self-service database platform: Create tooling that enables product engineering teams to provision, configure, scale, and manage Postgres and Redis instances through self-service workflows, with built-in guardrails for security, compliance, and best practices. Drive database reliability and operational excellence: Establish and enforce database best practices across the organization — connection pooling, query optimization, backup/restore strategies, failover procedures, and change management. Participate in on-call rotations for database incidents. Collaborate with engineering teams: Pa