Director, Data Platform (Fintech)

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

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

Company

Airwallex is an AI-native financial operating system providing global payments infrastructure and financial products for businesses.

What you will do

• Lead and grow the data platform engineering team through technical direction, mentorship, career development, and clear ownership.
• Set strategy for high-volume financial data ingestion across payment processors, banks, billing systems, and ERP/GL platforms, ensuring correctness, replayability, and recovery.
• Lead the Databricks lakehouse evolution using Spark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, dbt, Python, and SQL, optimizing scale, performance, reliability, and cost.
• Define standards for data contracts, schema evolution, drift detection, data quality, and canonical financial models.
• Evolve batch processing toward near-real-time systems using Kafka, CDC, micro-batching, incremental processing, and Dagster.
• Lead platform migrations, production reliability initiatives, infrastructure strategy, and cross-functional architecture with product, accounting, ML, infrastructure, and platform teams.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in data platform, backend, or infrastructure engineering, including significant experience leading engineering teams.
• Proven experience managing and developing senior engineers and technical leads and building strong, autonomous teams.
• Deep expertise in data platforms, distributed systems, data modeling, and production data pipelines.
• Strong experience with Python and SQL, plus hands-on experience with Spark, Databricks, Delta Lake, dbt, and modern lakehouse architectures.
• Experience building reliable ingestion systems with large-scale backfills, incremental processing, checkpointing, rate-limit handling, idempotency, and failure recovery.
• Strong understanding of streaming and event-driven architectures, including Kafka, CDC, and micro-batching, plus orchestration with Dagster.
• Experience optimizing PostgreSQL and analytical workloads for performance and cost.
• Experience operating production infrastructure on GCP, with familiarity with Terraform, Kubernetes/GKE, Helm, GitOps, and CI/CD.
• Strong understanding of observability, reliability engineering, production operations, complex technical migrations, and cross-team technical communication.
• Passion for building teams and infrastructure that power reliable, scalable, mission-critical financial systems.

Culture & Benefits

• Founder-level ownership, first-principles decision-making, high standards, and end-to-end engineering responsibility.
• Work on intelligent financial systems using unique, end-to-end financial datasets and challenging data platform problems.
• US-based employees may receive medical, dental, vision, 401(k), disability, life insurance, and well-being benefits.
• US-based employees receive 20 paid vacation days and 12 paid company holidays annually.
• Potential additional compensation includes equity, annual bonuses, commissions, RSUs, or other compensation depending on the role and employment location.

Hiring process

• Apply only through careers.airwallex.com or Airwallex's official LinkedIn page.
• Official communications come from an @airwallex.com email address; Airwallex does not request bank details, sensitive identification numbers, or payments during recruitment.
• Unsolicited resumes from search firms or recruiters are not accepted.