Description
About the Role
As a Data Platform Principal Architect at Airwallex, you will play a crucial role in architecting the governed, reusable data, knowledge, and skills layers that power analytics, AI agents, and real-time decision systems across the organization. You will define scalable patterns for structured datasets, semantic models, business metrics, entity relationships, contextual documentation, analytical workflows, agent-callable tools, and transformation primitives.
Key Responsibilities
- Own the technical execution of regional and global data localisation strategies within Databricks, balancing regulatory requirements with a unified global data model across priority markets.
- Design scalable patterns for governed datasets, semantic models, knowledge artifacts, analytical workflows, agent-callable tools, and transformation primitives.
- Reconcile local compliance constraints with global consistency in data definitions, metrics, and knowledge assets.
- Partner with Data Science, AI Engineering, Product, and Risk teams to support experimentation, high-quality decision-making, and reliable AI-enabled workflows.
- Lead global data modelling efforts, define Agent Interfaces through APIs and tools, and embed automated lineage and quality controls through Governance-as-Code.
- Serve as the primary technical authority as the team’s most senior individual contributor, leading design reviews and mentoring engineers.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience designing and building large-scale data systems with strong architectural fundamentals.
- Hands-on experience with the Databricks ecosystem, including Unity Catalog and Delta Lake.
- Experience implementing semantic layers or metric stores to enable consistent reporting and analytics.
- Strong understanding of how AI and agent-based systems consume data, with experience building APIs or data services to support them.
- Experience designing data solutions that meet regional data residency and compliance requirements.
- Demonstrated senior-level individual contributor experience, including leading design reviews and mentoring engineers.
Nice to Have
- Comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty.
- Ownership mentality and proactive problem-solving.
- Ability to connect dots across functions and hold the big picture without losing grip on details.
- Simplification of complex problems.
Work Environment
- Work from the Singapore office five days a week.
Team Overview
The Knowledge Platform team is at the heart of Airwallex's data and AI strategy, building foundational infrastructure to empower the entire company to leverage data, AI, and ML into business impact. The team's mission is to evolve the full data ecosystem into a fully AI agent-ready infrastructure, enabling customers to engage directly with the data platform to extract actionable value.