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Senior Manager, Data Platform - T0

Airwallex· Engineering
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Hybrid (US - San Francisco)$255k - $300kFull-timePosted 2w ago

About the role

Senior Manager of Data Platform Engineering leading the data backbone of Airwallex's financial systems, focusing on high-volume data ingestion, Databricks lakehouse, data orchestration, canonical financial models, and reliable, scalable, near real-time data platforms.

Responsibilities

  • Lead and grow a high-performing data platform engineering team, providing technical direction, mentorship, career development, and clear ownership.
  • Set the technical strategy for high-volume financial data ingestion across payment processors, banks, billing systems, and ERP/GL platforms, with guarantees around correctness, replayability, and recovery.
  • Lead the evolution of our Databricks lakehouse using Spark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, dbt, Python, and SQL, optimizing for scale, performance, reliability, and cost.
  • Define standards for data contracts, schema evolution, drift detection, data quality, and canonical financial models.
  • Evolve the platform from batch toward near-real-time processing using Kafka, CDC, micro-batching, incremental processing, and Dagster orchestration.
  • Own the architecture of canonical financial models that transform complex source data into consistent financial objects and relationships powering our accounting engine.
  • Partner with infrastructure and platform teams to build reliable production foundations across observability, alerting, incident response, recovery, and operational readiness.
  • Guide infrastructure strategy across GCP, Terraform, Kubernetes/GKE, Helm, GitOps, and CI/CD.
  • Lead migrations from legacy pipelines to the lakehouse, with rigorous parity validation, staged rollouts, and clear rollback strategies.
  • Drive performance and cost optimization across PostgreSQL, Databricks, and large-scale data workloads.
  • Partner with product, accounting, ML, and platform leadership to translate business needs into scalable data platform capabilities.
  • Set technical direction through architecture reviews, design documents, engineering standards, and long-term platform roadmaps.
  • Champion AI-assisted engineering practices that improve team velocity while maintaining high standards for code quality, testing, security, and reliability.

Qualifications

  • 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.
  • Experience with data orchestration platforms such as Dagster and designing for freshness, partitioning, and incremental computation.
  • 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, and production operations.
  • Excellent technical communication skills, with the ability to influence architecture and engineering decisions across teams.
  • Experience leading complex technical migrations and balancing long-term platform strategy with near-term business priorities.
  • Passion for building teams and infrastructure that power reliable, scalable, mission-critical financial systems.

Skills

Required:Data platform leadershipData ingestion strategyDatabricks lakehousePythonSQLKafkaDagster
Last updated Oct 7, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About Airwallex

Trusted Global Payments & Financial Platform

Grow your business faster with Airwallex - global business accounts, high speed transfers, multi-currency cards, online payments, embedded finance, and more.

PaymentsBankingFinancialGlobal
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