Manager, Data Engineering

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 Data & AI org 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’re looking for a Data Engineering Manager to lead a team within our Strategic Data Org and help scale the data foundations that power Airwallex’s products, analytics, and operational decision-making. In this role, you will lead engineers working on data modeling, pipelines, and analytics-ready datasets across domains such as regulatory reporting, data content foundation, customer and business data, and growth data. You’ll partner closely with engineering leaders, product and business stakeholders, and adjacent platform teams to turn ambiguous business needs into reliable, well-structured data solutions. This is a hybrid role based in San Francisco. Team Leadership & People Management Hire, coach, and grow a team of data engineers, setting clear expectations and providing regular feedback and career development support. Establish team rituals, priorities, and ways of working that balance delivery speed with engineering rigor. Act as a technical mentor, reviewing designs and code where needed, and helping engineers grow their skills in data modeling, pipeline engineering, and governance. Manage performance, workload, and hiring plans in line with business needs. Drive AI strategy and AI automation for the team. Data Modeling Strategy Set the technical direction for data modeling across the team, ensuring the org selects appropriate schema designs (e.g., star schema, snowflake, normalized vs. denormalized) based on business use cases. Champion the concept of Single Source of Truth (SSOT) across data layers and pipelines, and hold the team accountable to it. Ensure your team collaborates effectively with business stakeholders to translate data needs into clean, structured, well-documented models. Oversee data consistency, traceability, and quality standards across multiple data sources and domains. ETL & Data Pipeline Oversight Guide the team's approach to building and maintaining batch and streaming ETL pipelines, from ingestion through transformation and