Staff Software Engineer, Risk

About Airwallex

Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. More than 675,000 businesses, including McLaren Racing, Qantas, SHEIN, and TikTok, use us, directly or through our platform partners, to run their financial operations or build and monetize financial products of their own.

We started in Melbourne in 2015 to build the infrastructure global commerce runs on. We're the regulated backbone behind global payments: not by accident, but by design. A decade plus, 85+ licenses, and a financial infrastructure spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.

We're co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, with more than 2,700 people across 27 offices. We hire builders with founder-level energy, people who move fast with good judgment, dig in with real curiosity, and make calls from first principles rather than waiting to be told what to do. Read our operating principles to see it in full.

How you'll make impact

Our mission is to keep Airwallex’s products and services safe and secure while making Airwallex a trusted partner for businesses around the world. You’ll build risk capabilities across payment products and transaction systems, working with graph technologies, machine learning, and LLMs.

• Own the design and development of highly available, high-concurrency components within our microservice architecture using Java or Kotlin.

• Improve fraud detection, risk decisioning, and alert triage through graph technologies, machine learning, and LLMs.

• Partner with senior technical leaders and globally distributed teams across Seattle, Singapore, and China to strengthen our approach to risk management.

• Experiment with new technologies and turn architectural improvements into stronger, more scalable systems.

• Raise engineering standards by mentoring less-experienced engineers and promoting strong software practices.

You'll work from our Seattle office three days a week.

What we're looking for

Essentials

• 8+ years of core Java development experience and 5+ years building internet applications, large-scale financial systems, or e-commerce platforms.

• 3+ years of experience developing risk or payment platforms.

• A bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field.

• Strong proficiency in Java, including multithreading, high concurrency, I/O or NIO, and network communication.

• Experience designing and developing large-scale distributed, high-concurrency, high-load, and highly available systems.

• Strong knowledge of server technologies and experience optimising service response, data queries, service quality, concurrency, and availability.

• Experience with Spring or Spring Boot and RESTful services.

• Experience with Gradle, Maven, or other build tools.

• Familiarity with JSON and XML.

• Experience working effectively with senior technical stakeholders and mentoring less-experienced engineers.

Preferred

• In-depth knowledge of risk management strategies and fraud detection techniques, particularly in financial services or fintech.

• Familiarity with graph databases and using them for pattern and anomaly detection.

• Experience with machine learning models and frameworks for predictive risk analytics.

• Experience with real-time data-streaming technologies such as Apache Kafka or Flink.

• Strong data analytics skills, including experience with ClickHouse, Spark, or NoSQL databases for large-scale data processing and risk analysis.

• Experience with incident response and risk mitigation planning.

• Strong communication and collaboration skills.

You'll thrive here if

• You're comfortable owning the roadmap yourself.

• You're comfortable making decisions with incomplete information and moving quickly anyway.

• You’re comfortable operating across time zones with a globally distributed team, including colleagues based in APAC and EMEA.

• You value in-person collaboration and are happy being in the office three days a week.

• You simplify complexity rather than hiding behind it.

Learn more about your team

Risk Platform builds the decisioning infrastructure that sits between Airwallex and every dollar that moves through it, protecting 150,000+ businesses moving over US$260 billion a year across 150+ countries and 60+ currencies, and deciding, often in milliseconds, whether a new signup is real, a payment is safe, or a login is who they claim to be. The hard part is that fraud evolves fast, and every decision carries a two-sided cost: miss an attack and money is lost, over-block and a legitimate business can't get paid. We build this with streaming pipelines processing billions of events a day, graph databases exposing coordinated fraud rings, ML models scoring every transaction, and LLM agents that triage alerts. You don't need a fintech background, just an appetite for adversarial systems problems where the scoreboard is measured in dollars. If you want to help scale one of the world's fastest-growing financial platforms safely, this is the team.

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.