Senior Backend Engineer, Financial Markets

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 2,200 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.

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.

The Financial Markets team powers the core FX and liquidity technology at Airwallex. Within this team, our liquidity platform ensures that funds are always in the right place at the right time, optimising flows, enabling seamless internal transfers across currencies, and supporting global business needs. From forecasting liquidity requirements to solving complex scaling challenges, we build data-driven, precise solutions that keep Airwallex running at speed.

We’re now looking for a talented, driven engineer to join the FX Platform team and help deliver on this vision.

You are an experienced backend engineer who is comfortable working in complex domains like financial markets, payments or other high-integrity distributed systems. You care deeply about correctness, simplicity and operability, and you’re happy to engage with product and non-technical stakeholders on trade-offs.

You’re pragmatic: you can balance ideal architectures with the realities of delivery, and you’re comfortable iterating on systems that are already in production.

This role is based in Melbourne.

• Design, build and own backend services for FX pricing, execution and risk management, with a focus on performance, correctness and reliability.

• Contribute to the evolution of our FX platform architecture (microservices, event-driven workflows, Kafka, gRPC, SQL/NoSQL datastores), keeping latency low and throughput high.

• Implement and maintain robust controls for pricing, limits, risk, reconciliation and monitoring, ensuring our systems behave predictably under stress and failure scenarios.

• Work end-to-end on features: from requirements and solution design, to implementation, automated testing, deployment and operational runbooks.

• Collaborate with Product, Treasury, Risk, Data and other engineering teams to design APIs and data contracts that are easy to use, observable and backward compatible.

• Instrument services with metrics, logs and tracing, and use these to drive capacity planning, performance optimisation and incident resolution.

• Participate in code reviews, technical design discussions and knowledge-sharing sessions; mentor less-experienced engineers where appropriate.

• Take part in our on-call rotation (with strong observability, runbooks and support from the team) to ensure the FX platform remains reliable and highly available.

We're looking for people who meet the minimum qualifications for this role. The preferred qualifications are great to have, but are not mandatory.

• 5+ years of experience building and operating backend systems in production.

• Strong programming experience in one or more JVM languages (e.g. Kotlin, Java) or a comparable backend stack, and a willingness to work primarily in the JVM ecosystem.

• Solid understanding of distributed systems fundamentals: concurrency, data consistency, idempotency, retries, backoff, and failure modes in networked services.

• Experience designing and working with REST and/or gRPC APIs, and persistence layers using relational databases (e.g. PostgreSQL) and/or key-value stores.

• Proficiency with event-driven architectures and message brokers/streams (e.g. Kafka or similar).

• Strong focus on testing and quality: unit, integration and contract tests; familiarity with CI/CD pipelines.

• Good grasp of observability: metrics, logging, tracing and alerting, and how to use them to debug production issues.

• Clear written and verbal communication skills; comfortable working with cross-functional partners in a fast-paced environment.

• Experience in financial services, FX pricing, execution or risk management

#Melbourne

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.

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.