Staff Software Engineer, Payments

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 In our Payments Team, your responsibilities extend beyond delivering product features to achieving business outcomes. Your tasks will involve developing various REST services and integration components within a backend microservices architecture, connecting with our React frontend. We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help define the technical direction of our Payments platform, lead complex architecture decisions, and build highly reliable, high-volume distributed systems that directly impact merchant experience and business outcomes. What You’ll Do Lead the architecture and evolution of next-generation Payment Acceptance infrastructure. Design and build scalable backend services, REST APIs, event-driven systems, and integration components within a microservices architecture. Drive complex initiatives across payment gateways, acquiring, issuing, card networks, and local payment methods. Partner with product, business, infrastructure, and external engineering teams to translate merchant needs into technical solutions. Conduct architectural reviews, address technical debt, and improve system reliability, scalability, and operational effectiveness. Raise the engineering bar through strong design practices, code quality, testing, observability, and mentorship. Minimum Qualifications 10+ years of software engineering experience, including Staff-level technical leadership or equivalent ownership of complex backend systems. Strong experience designing and operating high-volume distributed systems, preferably in payments, fintech, commerce, or financial infrastructure. Recent hands-on experience with Java or Kotlin and Spring / Spring Boot. Expertise building REST APIs, backend microservices, Kafka-based event streams, and distributed data stores such as Cassandra, Hazelcast, Oracle Coherence, or similar. Experience with cloud platforms such as GCP or AWS, plus Docker and Kubernetes. Strong familiarity with observability and operational tooling such as New Relic, StatsD, ELK, Datadog, Prometheus, or similar. Proven ability to lead projects from concept to production with a focus on quality, testing, reliability, and maintainability. Excellent communication skills and ability to influence across engineering, product, and business stakeholders. Preferred Qualifications Experience building payment gateways, acquiring platforms, issuing platforms, or payment acceptance infrastructure. Experience integrating major card networks such as Visa and Mastercard. Experience with local payment methods such as iDEAL, Klarna, Trustly, or similar. Familiarity with authorization, capture, refunds, chargebacks, settlement, reconciliation, fraud, risk, or PCI/compliance workflows. Experience mentoring senior engineers and leading cross-team technical initiatives. 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 pay