Engineering Lead - Onboarding

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 2,000 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.
The Opportunity: Lead Our Onboarding Team
The Onboarding team is at the core of Airwallex's mission. We play a pivotal role in enabling Airwallex's global growth. We build KYC and verification systems. Our goal is to reduce barriers to entry, enhance compliance and security, and enable global expansion for our customers.
As Engineering Lead, you will own both the technical direction and the people leadership of the Onboarding team. You'll be collaborating across Product, Risk, Data, and Design to ensure we deliver customer-first solutions that unlock growth worldwide. You will set technical direction, and guide a team of engineers to deliver scalable, secure onboarding infrastructure that empowers businesses worldwide.
What You'll Do

• Lead & Mentor: Manage, coach, and grow a team of frontend and backend engineers. Foster a collaborative, inclusive, high-performing environment.
• Hands-On Leadership: Drive architecture and technical design for scalable KYC and onboarding systems. Provide technical guidance and elevate engineering standards.
• Build Scalable Onboarding Systems: Lead development of microservices in Java/Kotlin, supporting global identity verification, liveness checks, and risk-based operations.
• Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Partner with Product, Risk, and Compliance teams to align technical solutions with regulatory requirements and customer experience.
• Promote Operational Excellence: Define and measure SLOs for reliability and performance. Improve observability, monitoring, and incident response.
• Ensure Security & Compliance: Champion secure coding practices, robust authentication/authorization, and proactive vulnerability management.
• Innovate & Improve: Explore automation and AI-driven solutions to scale onboarding and enhance fraud detection.

Who You Are

• Engineering Leader: 8+ years in backend/distributed systems engineering, with 2+ years of management experience.
• Systems Thinker: Strong expertise in building scalable, fault-tolerant microservices.
• Domain Familiarity: Experience in fintech, onboarding, KYC, or compliance systems is a plus.
• Customer-Centric: Empathetic toward customer onboarding pain points; balance security and UX.
• Data-Driven: Strong analytical mindset, leveraging data to improve systems and outcomes.
• Mentor & Bar Raiser: Committed to growing engineers and raising engineering quality.
• Clear Communicator: Able to translate technical concepts for stakeholders at all levels.
• Ownership-Driven: Proactive, accountable, and able to drive projects to success end-to-end.

Why Join Us

• Impact: Shape Airwallex's onboarding engine - the foundation of global business growth.
• Growth: Build your leadership career in a fast-paced, innovative fintech.
• Collaboration: Work with world-class engineers, product leaders, and compliance experts.
• Innovation: Drive adoption of AI, data, and automation in onboarding.

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.