Engineering Manager, Payroll

Overview

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. Valued at US$8 billion and backed by world-leading investors, 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.

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.

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

Payroll is a new product area at Airwallex, and London is where we’re building the engineering team from day one. As the first Engineering Manager for Payroll in London, you’ll have a rare opportunity to shape a foundational product line—setting the team’s operating model, technical direction, and delivery cadence from the start.

You’ll lead the build-out of the core Payroll software layer (services, APIs, workflows, integrations) that customers will trust every pay cycle. It’s a high-ownership, high-visibility role with real scope: balancing product speed with the engineering bar required for correctness, security, and compliance in a regulated domain.

What you’ll do

• Build, lead, and grow a high-performing Payroll engineering team in London.
• Partner with Product and Design to define roadmap, scope, and success metrics; translate customer needs into an executable plan.
• Own the technical strategy and architecture for Payroll services and APIs, with a focus on scalability, reliability, security, and maintainability.
• Drive strong delivery practices: planning, prioritisation, execution, and continuous improvement.
• Lead cross-functional execution with stakeholders across Compliance/Legal, Risk, Operations, Support, and other engineering teams.
• Stay hands-on where it matters: guide design reviews, de-risk complex initiatives, and raise the bar on engineering quality.
• Establish operational excellence for production systems (monitoring, incident response, postmortems, reliability improvements), and ensure auditability/traceability is built in.

What you’ll need

Minimum Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including strong backend/system design expertise.
• 2+ years experience as an Engineering Manager leading small to mid-sized teams (or equivalent leadership experience).
• Strong product sense: ability to make tradeoffs, iterate quickly, and build for customer outcomes.
• Track record building API- and integration-heavy systems in production environments.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills in cross-functional settings.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in fintech, payroll, payments, or other regulated domains.
• Experience building 0→1 products/teams and scaling systems as adoption grows.

Salary: £135,000 – £178,000 + bonus + equity

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, or any form of payment during the application or interview process. All official communication will come from an @airwallex.com email address. Please apply only through careers.airwallex.com or our official LinkedIn page. Airwallex does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firms/recruiters.

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.