Senior Software Engineer - Database

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 2,300 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

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.