Director, Knowledge Platform Engineering (relocate to Singapore)

About Airwallex

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 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.

Attributes We Value

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.

Role Summary

We’re hiring a Director, Knowledge Platform Engineering (based in Singapore) to own the architecture, delivery, and adoption of a governed, reusable Data → Knowledge → Skills stack that powers analytics, AI agents, and real-time decisioning across the company. This is a product-facing platform leadership role. The successful leader will design and scale the semantic and operational layers on top of our Data Lakehouse (Databricks), enforce strong governance and lineage, and productize capabilities so both human analysts and machine agents reason and act consistently.

The Role

Our platform is evolving beyond raw data storage into a structured, scalable system comprising three tightly integrated layers:

• Data – Governed, well-modeled, structured datasets including transactional records, event streams, dimensional models, and feature tables.
• Knowledge – A semantic layer that makes data meaningful to both humans and machines.
• Skills – Operationalized capabilities that act on data and knowledge.

We are looking for a leader who can architect and scale this governed stack across regions and use cases, while ensuring it remains accessible and intuitive for Data Science, AI engineering, and technical business stakeholders. The objective is to create a shared foundation that enables both human analysts and AI agents to reason consistently and act confidently.

A critical component of this role is ownership of the regional and global data localization strategy within our Databricks environment. This includes designing architectural patterns that satisfy regulatory requirements while preserving a unified global data model across priority markets.

You will partner closely with Data Science, AI engineering, Product, and Risk teams to ensure the platform supports rapid experimentation, intelligent automation, and high-quality decision-making, transforming raw data into durable knowledge and deployable skills across the organization.

Ideal Experience

• 15+ years in data or platform engineering, with 5+ years leading engineering teams in complex, multi-region environments.
• Proven experience architecting and scaling modern data platforms that extend beyond storage to include semantic layers, metadata systems, or knowledge graphs.
• Strong hands-on expertise in data modeling with robust data quality, lineage, and observability practices.
• Experience designing and operationalizing a governed semantic layer with standardized, auditable business metric definitions.
• Track record of building reusable, programmatic capabilities on top of data platforms.
• Deep familiarity with modern lakehouse architectures, particularly within a Databricks environment.
• Experience implementing regional data localization and residency strategies while maintaining a unified global data model.
• Strong understanding of data governance, privacy, and regulatory controls in multi-jurisdictional contexts.
• Platform-as-product mindset, with experience driving adoption, improving developer experience, and operating with clear SLAs/SLOs and measurable impact.

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.