Job description

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 2,700 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 airwallex.com to see it in full. HOW YOU'LL MAKE IMPACT The Infrastructure & Productivity team builds the technical foundation that enables Airwallex’s global engineering organisation to scale. Our customers are fellow engineers, and we make their work faster, safer, and more effective through reliable platforms, automation, and observability systems. As a Senior Software Engineer on the Observability team, you’ll build and operate the platforms that give engineering teams clear, timely, and actionable insight into the health and performance of Airwallex’s distributed systems. You’ll help reduce time to detect and resolve incidents, improve system reliability, and establish scalable observability practices across the company. - Build and operate highly scalable observability platforms covering metrics, logs, traces, events, alerting, dashboards, and service health. - Develop reliable software and platform capabilities that enable engineering teams to instrument, monitor, and troubleshoot their services with minimal friction. - Establish and evolve observability standards, including telemetry collection, instrumentation, alert quality, SLOs, SLIs, service ownership, and operational readiness. - Improve incident detection, diagnosis, and response through actionable alerts, intelligent correlation, service dependency visibility, and effective runbooks. - Build self-service tools and paved paths that make best practices the easiest way for engineers to adopt observability. - Partner closely with application, infrastructure, SRE, security, and product teams to understand operational challenges and deliver durable solutions. - Improve the scalability, reliability, performance, and cost efficiency of observability systems across multiple regions and environments. - Participate in design reviews, technical planning, code reviews, incident response, and post-incident learning. - Mentor engineers and contribute to a culture of ownership, operational excellence, and continuous improvement. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR ESSENTIALS - 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of building and operating production systems. - Strong proficiency in at least one backend programming language, such as Go, Java, Python, or Kotlin. - Hands-on experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale. - Practical experience with observability platforms and technologies such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, ELK, or equivalent solutions. - Strong understanding of metrics, logs, traces, alerting, service-level indicators, service-level objectives, and incident management. - Experience with cloud-native environments, Kubernetes, containers, and public cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure. - Experience with infrastructure as code and automated software delivery, using tools such as Terraform and CI/CD pipelines. - Strong system design and problem-solving skills, with the ability to make sound technical decisions in complex and ambiguous environments. - Excellent communication and collaboration skills, including the ability to work effectively with globally distributed engineering teams. - An ownership mindset and a commitment to improving systems rather than simply treating symptoms. PREFERRED - Experience building observability platforms or internal developer platforms used by multiple engineering teams. - Experience with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, Loki, Tempo, ClickHouse, Elasticsearch, Kafka, or similar technologies. - Experience designing high-volume telemetry ingestion, storage, querying, aggregation, and retention systems. - Familiarity with SRE practices, including on-call operations, incident response, postmortems, runbooks, and error budgets. - Experience with service meshes, Kubernetes operators, or large-scale microservice platforms. - Contributions to observability, cloud infrastructure, reliability, or open-source projects. - Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline. YOU'LL THRIVE HERE IF - You're comfortable owning the roadmap yourself. - You're comfortable making decisions with incomplete information and moving quickly anyway. - You’re comfortable operating across time zones with a globally distributed team, including colleagues based in APAC and EMEA. - You say what you mean. You're direct, but you lead with respect. - You connect dots across functions and hold the big picture without losing grip on the details. LEARN MORE ABOUT YOUR TEAM The Infrastructure & Productivity team at Airwallex builds the technical foundation that allows our global engineering organisation 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 optimising cloud costs, automating manual support, and driving standardisation 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. APPLICANT SAFETY POLICY: FRAUD AND THIRD-PARTY RECRUITERS To protect you from recruitment scams, please be aware that Airwallex will not ask for bank details, sensitive ID numbers (i.e. passport), or any form of payment during the application or interview process. All official communication will come from an @airwallex.com airwallex.com email address. Please apply only through careers.airwallex.com careers.airwallex.com or our official LinkedIn page. Airwallex does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firms/recruiters. Airwallex will not pay any fees to search firms/recruiters if a candidate is submitted by a search firm/recruiter unless an agreement has been entered into with respect to specific open position(s). Search firms/recruiters submitting resumes to Airwallex on an unsolicited basis shall be deemed to accept this condition, regardless of any other provision to the contrary. EQUAL OPPORTUNITY Airwallex is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and anyone seeking employment at Airwallex is considered based on merit, qualifications, competence and talent. We don’t regard color, religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, ancestry, citizenship, sex, marital or family status, disability, gender, or any other legally protected status when making our hiring decisions. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.

Requirements

Must-haves

Build and operate highly scalable observability platforms covering metrics, logs, traces, events, alerting, dashboards, and service health.
Develop reliable software and platform capabilities that enable engineering teams to instrument, monitor, and troubleshoot their services with minimal friction.
Establish and evolve observability standards, including telemetry collection, instrumentation, alert quality, SLOs, SLIs, service ownership, and operational readiness.
Improve incident detection, diagnosis, and response through actionable alerts, intelligent correlation, service dependency visibility, and effective runbooks.
Build self-service tools and paved paths that make best practices the easiest way for engineers to adopt observability.
Partner closely with application, infrastructure, SRE, security, and product teams to understand operational challenges and deliver durable solutions.
Improve the scalability, reliability, performance, and cost efficiency of observability systems across multiple regions and environments.
Participate in design reviews, technical planning, code reviews, incident response, and post-incident learning.
Mentor engineers and contribute to a culture of ownership, operational excellence, and continuous improvement.
5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of building and operating production systems.
Strong proficiency in at least one backend programming language, such as Go, Java, Python, or Kotlin.
Hands-on experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale.
Practical experience with observability platforms and technologies such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, ELK, or equivalent solutions.
Strong understanding of metrics, logs, traces, alerting, service-level indicators, service-level objectives, and incident management.
Experience with cloud-native environments, Kubernetes, containers, and public cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
Experience with infrastructure as code and automated software delivery, using tools such as Terraform and CI/CD pipelines.
Strong system design and problem-solving skills, with the ability to make sound technical decisions in complex and ambiguous environments.

Nice-to-haves

Experience building observability platforms or internal developer platforms used by multiple engineering teams.
Experience with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, Loki, Tempo, ClickHouse, Elasticsearch, Kafka, or similar technologies.
Experience designing high-volume telemetry ingestion, storage, querying, aggregation, and retention systems.
Familiarity with SRE practices, including on-call operations, incident response, postmortems, runbooks, and error budgets.
Experience with service meshes, Kubernetes operators, or large-scale microservice platforms.
Contributions to observability, cloud infrastructure, reliability, or open-source projects.
Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline.

Application prep

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Keywords to mirror

aigojavapythonkotlinkubernetesawsgcpazureci/cd

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