Description
Compensation
The Senior Manager, Data Platform - T0 role offers a salary range of $255K – $300K, along with equity and bonus opportunities.
About Airwallex
Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. More than 675,000 businesses use us 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.
About the Team
This team designs intelligent, autonomous systems that eliminate financial operations for companies globally. We automate everything from bookkeeping and reconciliation to tax, payroll, forecasting, and document understanding.
About the Role
As a Senior Manager of Data Platform Engineering, you’ll lead the team responsible for the data backbone of our financial systems. You’ll set the technical direction for high-volume financial data ingestion, our Databricks lakehouse, data orchestration, canonical financial models, and the infrastructure that makes our data platform reliable, scalable, and increasingly real-time.
What You'll Do
- 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.
- Lead the evolution of our 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 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.
What You’ll Need to Have
- 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.