Director, Data and Knowledge Platform Engineering

Job description

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 250,000 businesses worldwide – including Brex, 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 2,300 of the brightest and most innovative people in tech across 27 offices around the globe. Valued at US$11 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 https://www.airwallex.com/us/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. 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. Airwallex has established dual HQs in San Francisco, CA, and Singapore, and recently crossed the US$1B ARR threshold. We were founded in Melbourne and, in our 10th year, we have a team of over 2,000 of the brightest and most innovative people in technology across 26 offices worldwide. Valued at US$8 billion and backed by world-leading investors including T. Rowe Price, Activant, Lingotto, Robinhood Ventures, TIAA Ventures, Visa, Airtree, Blackbird, Sequoia, DST Global, Greenoaks, Salesforce Ventures, Lone Pine, and Square Peg, 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. Role Summary: We’re hiring a Director, Data and Knowledge Platform Engineering (based in San Francisco) to own the architecture, delivery, and adoption of a governed, reusable Data → Knowledge → Skills stack that powers analytics, AI agents, and real-time decisioning across the company. This is a product-facing platform leadership role. The successful leader will design and scale the semantic and operational layers on top of our Data Lakehouse (Databricks), enforce strong governance and lineage, and productize capabilities so both human analysts and machine agents reason and act consistently. The Role: Our platform is evolving beyond raw data storage into a structured, scalable system comprising three tightly integrated layers: Data – Governed, well-modeled, structured datasets including transactional records, event streams, dimensional models, and feature tables. This foundation must deliver high quality, strong lineage, and built-in regional compliance. It should be clean, trusted, and fully queryable. Knowledge – A semantic layer that makes data meaningful to both humans and machines. This includes standardized business metric definitions, entity relationships, contextual documentation, and company-specific domain knowledge. It enables analysts and AI agents alike to ask questions such as “What is our net revenue retention in SEA?” and receive consistent, trustworthy answers without having to reverse-engineer underlying schemas. Skills – Operationalized capabilities that act on data and knowledge. These include reusable analytical workflows, agent-callable tools, automated pipelines, API endpoints, and transformation primitives. Together, they form the building blocks that allow AI agents and internal teams not only to query information but to reason, automate, and execute reliably. We are looking for a leader who can architect and scale this governed stack across regions and use cases, while ensuring it remains accessible and intuitive for Data Science, AI engineering, and technical business stakeholders. The objective is to create a shared foundation that enables both human analysts and AI agents to reason consistently and act confidently. A critical component of this role is ownership of the regional and global data localization strategy within our Databricks environment. This includes designing architectural patterns that satisfy regulatory requirements while preserving a unified global data model across priority markets. The platform must reconcile local compliance constraints with global consistency in definitions, metrics, and knowledge artifacts. You will partner closely with Data Science, AI engineering, Product, and Risk teams to ensure the platform supports rapid experimentation, intelligent automation, and high-quality decision-making, transforming raw data into durable knowledge and deployable skills across the organization. IDEAL EXPERIENCE - 15+ years in data or platform engineering, with 5+ years leading engineering teams in complex, multi-region environments. - Proven experience architecting and scaling modern data platforms that extend beyond storage to include semantic layers, metadata systems, or knowledge graphs. - Strong hands-on expertise in data modeling (transactional, event-driven, dimensional, feature tables) with robust data quality, lineage, and observability practices. - Experience designing and operationalizing a governed semantic layer with standardized, auditable business metric definitions. - Track record of building reusable, programmatic capabilities on top of data platforms (APIs, orchestration frameworks, analytical workflows, agent-callable tools). - Deep familiarity with modern lakehouse architectures, particularly within a Databricks environment. - Experience implementing regional data localization and residency strategies while maintaining a unified global data model. - Strong understanding of data governance, privacy, and regulatory controls in multi-jurisdictional contexts. - Platform-as-product mindset, with experience driving adoption, improving developer experience, and operating with clear SLAs/SLOs and measurable impact. 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 http://airwallex.com email address. Please apply only through careers.airwallex.com http://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.