Staff Software Engineer, Search Platform

About Airwallex
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.
Attributes We Value
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.
What you'll do
As a vital member of the Search PlatformTeam, you will be part of a specialized force that meticulously bridges the gap between business exigencies and architectural finesse. You will engage in:

• An advanced application infrastructure meticulously crafted to alleviate common challenges across the entire organization, significantly lowering maintenance costs for developers and streamlining innovation;
• Masterfully addressing intricate, organization-wide challenges through the strategic deployment of cutting-edge technologies such as distributed systems, vector databases and data pipeline solutions;
• Comprehensive, organization-wide evaluations of strategic solutions.

Responsibilities:

• Work closely with Product Managers to analyze the product requirements and then produce the technique solutions & execution plan to deliver the software products;
• Hands-on design, implement and deliver production-grade streaming ingestion using Flink (or similar technologies), focusing on low-latency, high-throughput, and fault-tolerant design
• Tackle challenging problems in timely computation, stateful stream processing, partitioning, and resilience. Proactively troubleshooting and addressing technical bottlenecks.
• Participate in and contribute to critical code, design, and performance reviews, raising the technical bar across the team
• Engage with the Technical leads in building a backlog that continuously contributes to the execution of the roadmap;
• Collaborate with local/global engineering teams, infrastructure teams, and product development teams and translate business requirements into robust engineering solutions

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

• More than 7 years of back-end development experience; Have experience in developing large-scale distributed systems.
• Proficient in coding and scripting languages (Java(Kotlin) /C++ /Python, etc.) with strong software and system design abilities.
• Deep familiarity with the standard library, idiomatic usage, and best practices of your primary programming languages. Able to write clear, maintainable, and efficient code
• In depth knowledge on storage & streaming over PostgreSQL or Kafka.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience on event driven architecture & parallelisation
• Prior work on large-scale data processing pipelines and Search engine(e.g., using Kafka, Spark, or Flink & ElasticSearch)
• Exposure to microservice architectures, observability, and cloud-native infrastructure (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience integrating AI-powered search enhancements, such as embeddings, semantic search, or re-ranking models is a plus.

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 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.
Equal opportunity
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.