Description
Compensation
- Base Compensation $140K – $240K • Offers Equity • Offers Bonus
Airwallex promotes fair compensation practices in accordance with applicable national, federal, state, and local law.
These expected base pay ranges are based on information at the time this post was generated and represent the company’s good faith minimum and maximum ranges for this role at the time of posting.
The actual compensation offered to a candidate will be dependent upon multiple factors, including but not limited to relevant experience, skills and other qualifications, geographic location as noted, internal equity, and other external market factors.
Certain roles may be eligible for other compensation including, but not limited to, annual bonuses, commissions, RSUs, or other forms of compensation in addition to the established salary range.
Benefits vary by country and employment type in accordance with local statutory requirements. All employees receive at least the statutory minimum for paid annual leave and public holidays, with many of our locations offering additional company-provided vacation days.
For example, for US-based employees, they are eligible to participate in medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan, short-term and long-term disability, basic life insurance, and well-being benefits. US-based employees also receive 20 paid days of vacation and 12 paid days of company holidays in a calendar year.
Further details about our compensation and benefits package are available upon request by contacting our Talent Acquisition team.
How you'll make impact
As a Senior Software Engineer on the Database SRE team, you’ll design and build the platforms, automation, and AI-driven tooling that power Airwallex’s database infrastructure. You’ll work across PostgreSQL, Google CloudSQL, Redis, Google Memorystore, and GCP to solve problems at the intersection of database reliability engineering, platform automation, and AI. Your work will directly improve the availability, performance, security, and operational scalability of the data layer supporting Airwallex’s global payments platform.
- Build a unified database observability platform that provides real-time visibility into availability, security posture, reliability metrics, and latency across database instances.
- Design secure MCP (Model Context Protocol) interfaces that enable AI agents to query and interact with production databases while maintaining strict access controls.
- Develop an agentic AI DBA to automate performance tuning, capacity planning, schema review, incident triage, and remediation.
- Create self-service workflows that allow product engineering teams to provision, configure, scale, and manage PostgreSQL and Redis instances with built-in security, compliance, and reliability guardrails.
- Establish database reliability practices across connection pooling, query optimization, backup and recovery, failover, and change management, and participate in on-call rotations for database incidents.
- Partner with product engineers to diagnose performance issues, review schema designs, and improve data modelling and access patterns.
You’ll be based in Seattle and work from the office three days a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
What we're looking for
Essentials
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with strong proficiency in a backend language such as Python, Go, Java, or Kotlin.
- Deep experience with PostgreSQL, including performance tuning, query optimization, replication, backup and recovery, schema design, and operational best practices.
- Experience with Redis, including data modelling, clustering, persistence strategies, and operational management.
- Hands-on experience with GCP or an equivalent cloud provider, infrastructure as code such as Terraform, Kubernetes, and Docker.
- A track record of building automation, tooling, or platforms that replace manual operational work and make database operations scalable.
- Strong system design skills, with the ability to architect reliable and scalable infrastructure services.
Preferred
- Experience with Google CloudSQL and/or Google Memorystore.
- Experience building internal developer platforms, database-as-a-service systems, or self-service infrastructure tooling.
- Experience with AI/ML technologies, LLM integration, or AI-powered automation, particularly for infrastructure or operations use cases.
- Familiarity with MCP or similar patterns for safe programmatic access to production systems.
- Experience with observability tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, or Datadog, and with building monitoring and alerting systems for database infrastructure.
- Experience in fintech, payments, or another regulated industry where data integrity, security, and compliance are critical.
You'll thrive here if
- You're comfortable owning the roadmap yourself.
- You own the outcome and you don't wait for permission to fix what's broken.
- You're comfortable with ambiguity. Give you a problem, not a prescription, and you'll run with it.
- You simplify complexity rather than hiding behind it.
- You value in-person collaboration and are happy being in the office three days a week.
Learn more about your team
The Infrastructure & Productivity team at Airwallex builds the technical foundation that allows our global engineering organization to scale. Our customers are our fellow engineers, and our mission is to make their daily work faster, safer, and more effective by managing the core platforms everyone relies on, from Kubernetes and Kafka to CI/CD pipelines and observability systems. The real challenge lies in keeping these global systems highly reliable and secure while simultaneously optimizing cloud costs, automating manual support, and driving standardization without slowing down product delivery. We operate under the philosophy that best practices should be the path of least resistance, not a forced mandate. If you're a systems thinker who wants to work close to the core of the company and directly shape how we build, deploy, and scale software worldwide, this is where that work happens.