Engineering Manager, Data Knowledge Platform

We hire successful builders with founder-like energy who want real impact, accelerated learning, and true ownership. You bring strong role-related expertise and sharp thinking, and you’re motivated by our mission and operating principles. You move fast with good judgment, dig deep with curiosity, and make decisions from first principles, balancing speed and rigor.

You’re humble and collaborative; turn zero-to-one ideas into real products, and you “get stuff done” end-to-end. You use AI to work smarter and solve problems faster. Here, you’ll tackle complex, high-visibility problems with exceptional teammates and grow your career as we build the future of global banking. If that sounds like you, let’s build what’s next.

About the team

The Knowledge Platform team is at the heart of our company’s data and AI strategy. We are building the foundational infrastructure that empowers the entire company to leverage data, AI, and ML into business impact. We accomplish this by creating platforms that handle the entire data and AI/ML lifecycle, simplifying the interface while providing proper safety and governance. This includes managing our data infrastructure (Databricks, Spark, Kafka, etc.), the technology to serve that data to our users (RAG, MCP, etc.), and the platform to host and govern these AI/ML models.

In 2026, our team’s overarching mission is to evolve our full data ecosystem-encompassing both platform and models-into a fully AI agent-ready infrastructure; we will empower customers to engage directly with the data platform to extract actionable value through capabilities like analytics and natural language querying, while also upgrading the platform to deliver robust, real-time performance for instant, data-driven decision-making.

What you’ll do

As the Manager for Data Platform, you will oversee large-scale, cross-functional initiatives that impact the entire data ecosystem. You will be responsible for defining the multi-year vision and technical roadmap for all real-time data analysis and serving needs, ensuring they are aligned with broader business objectives and product goals. A key aspect of your role will also include scaling the engineering teams, defining new roles, and establishing best practices for communication and collaboration across multiple sub-teams., * Provide visionary technical leadership and define a clear 1-3 year strategic roadmap for the Realtime Data Platform.

• Lead the multi-year effort to modernize our core data platform, introducing real-time analytical processing at petabyte scale.
• Partner with product teams to enable new data-driven features, such as AI-powered applications or real-time dashboards, by ensuring the underlying platform capabilities are in place.
• Successfully scale and structure the engineering teams, including hiring new talent and mentoring managers and senior individual contributors.
• Cultivate and maintain strong relationships with product and other engineering teams, serving as a trusted technical advisor on all things Data and AI.

Do you have experience in Software architecture?, * A minimum of 8 years of experience in data or software engineering, with at least 3 years in a leadership or management role.

• Proven experience successfully managing and scaling an engineering team of 10+ people, including managers and senior individual contributors.
• Demonstrated ability to define and execute a technical strategy that led to a significant business outcome or operational improvement.
• Strong command of the data and software engineering domains, with a focus on architecture and strategy.
• Deep understanding of distributed data processing technologies (e.g., Apache Spark, Databricks) and event streaming (e.g., Kafka).
• Solid knowledge of modern data storage and serving technologies, such as CubeJS, ElasticSearch, and Clickhouse, and more.
• Familiarity with observability tooling such as Splunk, Grafana, and Prometheus., * Experience within the financial domain.
• Hands-on design experience in crafting data processing patterns for a modern Lakehouse architecture.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills tailored for diverse audiences (leadership, users, company-wide).
• Ability to rapidly evaluate various technologies and conduct proof of concepts to drive architecture design.
• Experience thriving in a complex environment.

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2.42.4 out of 5 stars San Francisco, CA Hybrid work $200,000 - $288,000 a year - Full-time

Airwallex is the only unified payments and financial platform for global businesses. Powered by our unique combination of proprietary infrastructure and software, we empower over 200,000 businesses worldwide - including Brex, Rippling, Navan, Qantas, SHEIN and many more - with fully integrated solutions to manage everything from business accounts, payments, spend management and treasury, to embedded finance at a global scale.

Proudly founded in Melbourne, we have a team of over 2,000 of the brightest and most innovative people in tech across 26 offices around the globe. Valued at US$8 billion and backed by world-leading investors including T. Rowe Price, Visa, Mastercard, Robinhood Ventures, Sequoia, Salesforce Ventures, DST Global, and Lone Pine Capital, Airwallex is leading the charge in building the global payments and financial platform of the future. If you’re ready to do the most ambitious work of your career, join us.