Engineering Lead/Manager, Risk

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 THE TEAM The Risk Platform team at Airwallex is responsible for managing the risk for all the products at Airwallex, including GTPN, PA, Issuing, Onboarding, and Account takeover. The risk landscape is constantly changing, and fraudsters are becoming increasingly sophisticated. We are at the forefront of innovation in risk management. Our mission is to keep Airwallex's products and services safe and secure, and make Airwallex a trusted partner for businesses around the world. We use cutting-edge technologies, such as graph, ML, and LLM, to implement and improve our strategy. We collaborate with other teams and our customers globally to ensure a holistic approach for risk management. This role is based in Singapore. WHAT YOU’LL DO As an Engineering Lead/Manager, you will own the strategy, roadmap, and delivery of real-time detection systems and client-facing fraud management products that protect customers and revenue at global scale. This is a hands-on leadership role: you will shape architecture and execution while developing managers and senior engineers to do the best work of their careers. - Provide strategic leadership for a mission-critical fraud and risk platform, aligning technical direction and capacity planning with business goals and regulatory requirements. - Work with PM, Design, Ops, Commercial and Strategy teams to shape the future of our fraud management products - Build and scale a high-performing engineering organization (including managers and senior ICs): set goals, establish career paths, run performance and compensation processes, and cultivate a culture of ownership, inclusion, and excellence. - Partner closely with PM to define the roadmap, prioritize a measurable backlog, and deliver outcomes that improve detection rates, reduce false positives, and minimize chargebacks. - Serve as the accountable owner for architecture and system quality across services, ensuring reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency for real-time decisioning under high load. - Remain hands-on where it matters: guide designs, review critical code and APIs, and de-risk complex initiatives with pragmatic technical deep dives. - Drive design and code quality: institute standards, reviews, and automated checks that raise the bar without slowing teams down. - Ensure cross-team collaboration with platform, data, SRE, security, and global engineering teams; remove blockers and foster clear interfaces, SLAs, and ownership. - Own operational excellence: on-call readiness, incident response, postmortems, observability, capacity planning, and continuous reliability improvements. - Lead talent strategy: recruit, onboard, and develop engineers and managers; build diverse teams and succession plans for sustained velocity. 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: - 8+ years in back-end engineering with 2+ years in engineering management, including ownership of complex, distributed systems in production. - Risk management or Fintech product engineering experience. - Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field. - Proficiency in Java, including multi-threading, high-concurrency patterns, I/O/NIO, and network programming. - Deep experience with distributed systems and high-availability, high-throughput architectures (caching, partitioning, consistency models, and resiliency patterns). - Proficiency with Spring / Spring Boot, HTTP, TCP/IP, REST, and build tools such as Gradle / Maven. - Practical experience with Docker and Kubernetes for containerization and orchestration. Preferred Qualifications: - Leadership across multiple disciplines (e.g., frontend, backend, data/ML, SRE) with managers-of-managers scope for Director-level candidates. - Working knowledge of machine learning in production and strong data analysis skills to interpret model and rule performance. - Fluency in English for effective collaboration across global teams and stakeholders. - Familiarity with modern data and storage technologies: Cassandra, Redis, NoSQL, Hadoop, and streaming systems (e.g., Kafka, Flink, Spark). - Polyglot engineering with one or more of Kotlin, Scala, Python, Golang. - Cloud experience with Alibaba Cloud, AWS, or GCP; strong grasp of cloud networking, security, and cost management. - Background with risk-specific components: rule engines, feature stores, model serving, A/B testing/experimentation, and real-time stream processing. - Awareness of regulatory and security standards relevant to payments (e.g., PCI DSS, SOC 2, data privacy best practices). What Will Set You Apart - You think in systems: data, models, rules, services, and people—optimizing the whole, not just parts. - You operate with clarity and urgency, turning ambiguity into decisive roadmaps and measurable results. - You coach and multiply leaders, not just output; you attract and retain top talent. - You balance pragmatism and rigor, delivering incrementally while paying down risk and tech debt deliberately. 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.