Senior Manager, Data Platform

Location: San Francisco, United States; this role is based in San Francisco.

Salary: $255,000–$300,000 annual base pay, plus potential equity and bonus.

Company

Airwallex is an AI-native financial operating system and regulated global payments infrastructure company serving businesses and financial product builders.

What you will do

• Lead and grow a high-performing data platform engineering team through technical direction, mentorship, career development, and clear ownership.
• Set the strategy for high-volume financial data ingestion across payment processors, banks, billing systems, and ERP/GL platforms.
• Lead the evolution of the Databricks lakehouse using Spark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, dbt, Python, and SQL.
• Define standards for data contracts, schema evolution, drift detection, data quality, and canonical financial models.
• Evolve batch systems toward near-real-time processing with Kafka, CDC, micro-batching, incremental processing, and Dagster.
• Guide production infrastructure, observability, incident response, migrations, performance optimization, and platform roadmaps across engineering, product, accounting, ML, and infrastructure teams.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in data platform, backend, or infrastructure engineering, including significant engineering leadership experience.
• Experience managing senior engineers and technical leads and building autonomous engineering teams.
• Deep expertise in data platforms, distributed systems, data modeling, and production data pipelines.
• Hands-on experience with Python, SQL, Spark, Databricks, Delta Lake, dbt, Kafka, CDC, and modern lakehouse architectures.
• Experience with Dagster, PostgreSQL optimization, GCP, Terraform, Kubernetes/GKE, Helm, GitOps, CI/CD, observability, and reliability engineering.
• Strong technical communication skills and experience leading complex migrations and architecture decisions.

Culture & Benefits

• Founder-level ownership, first-principles decision-making, curiosity, and high engineering standards.
• Work on intelligent financial systems using unique end-to-end financial datasets.
• US-based employees receive medical, dental, vision, 401(k), disability, life insurance, and well-being benefits.
• US-based employees receive 20 paid vacation days and 12 company holidays annually.
• Additional compensation may include equity, annual bonuses, commissions, or RSUs.