Airwallex
Senior Engineering Manager, Risk (Relocate to Singapore)
Airwallex, San Francisco, California, United States, 94199
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Senior Engineering Manager, Risk (Relocate to Singapore)
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Airwallex Overview
Airwallex is the only unified payments and financial platform for global businesses. We empower over 150,000 businesses worldwide with fully integrated solutions to manage everything from business accounts, payments, spend management and treasury, to embedded finance at a global scale. This role is based in Singapore. What You’ll Do
Provide strategic leadership for a mission-critical fraud and risk platform, aligning technical direction and capacity planning with business goals and regulatory requirements. 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 Product Management 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. Champion ML-in-production best practices: model serving, feature stores, rule engines, A/B experimentation, data quality SLAs, and human-in-the-loop feedback. 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. Preferred qualifications are nice-to-have but not mandatory. Minimum Qualifications
10+ years in back-end engineering with 4+ years in engineering management, including ownership of complex, distributed systems in production. Proven experience in online payments and payment fraud detection, with strong understanding of authorization flows, risk decisioning, and chargeback lifecycles. Working knowledge of machine learning in production and strong data analysis skills to interpret model and rule performance. 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. 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. Equal opportunity
Airwallex is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and consider each candidate on merit, qualifications, competence and talent. We do not discriminate based on color, religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, ancestry, citizenship, sex, marital or family status, disability, gender, or any legally protected status. If you require accommodation, please let us know. Compensation Range: SGD 320K - SGD 550K
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Senior Engineering Manager, Risk (Relocate to Singapore)
role at
Airwallex Overview
Airwallex is the only unified payments and financial platform for global businesses. We empower over 150,000 businesses worldwide with fully integrated solutions to manage everything from business accounts, payments, spend management and treasury, to embedded finance at a global scale. This role is based in Singapore. What You’ll Do
Provide strategic leadership for a mission-critical fraud and risk platform, aligning technical direction and capacity planning with business goals and regulatory requirements. 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 Product Management 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. Champion ML-in-production best practices: model serving, feature stores, rule engines, A/B experimentation, data quality SLAs, and human-in-the-loop feedback. 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. Preferred qualifications are nice-to-have but not mandatory. Minimum Qualifications
10+ years in back-end engineering with 4+ years in engineering management, including ownership of complex, distributed systems in production. Proven experience in online payments and payment fraud detection, with strong understanding of authorization flows, risk decisioning, and chargeback lifecycles. Working knowledge of machine learning in production and strong data analysis skills to interpret model and rule performance. 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. 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. Equal opportunity
Airwallex is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and consider each candidate on merit, qualifications, competence and talent. We do not discriminate based on color, religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, ancestry, citizenship, sex, marital or family status, disability, gender, or any legally protected status. If you require accommodation, please let us know. Compensation Range: SGD 320K - SGD 550K
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