Engineering Manager, Infrastructure Automation at Airwallex

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 – 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. 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 [Upgrade to PRO to see link] 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: Airwallex’s Infrastructure & Productivity division is the backbone of the company’s global engineering organization. We build and operate the cloud infrastructure, developer tooling, observability platforms, data pipelines, and SRE practices that power hundreds of engineers across 10+ offices and multiple time zones. Our mission is to build and operate a globally distributed platform, empower engineering teams with world-class tools, and advocate best practices that make the right way the easy way. Within this division, we are forming a new Infrastructure Automation team with an ambitious mandate: leverage AI agents to automate the operational toil out of DevOps, SRE, and DBA workflows. This team will build intelligent systems that handle incident response, root cause analysis, database operations, infrastructure provisioning, and change management—turning manual runbooks into autonomous agents that operate with human-in-the-loop safety guardrails. You will lead this team from Seattle, working alongside a globally distributed organization of infrastructure engineers, SREs, DBAs, and platform architects who are passionate about reliability, automation, and engineering excellence. The Role: As the Engineering Manager for Infrastructure Automation, you will build and lead a team of 5 engineers focused on creating AI-powered agents that automate Airwallex’s infrastructure operations at scale. You will define the team’s technical vision, hire exceptional talent, and drive execution on high-impact automation initiatives that reduce operational toil and improve system reliability across the entire engineering organization. This role combines people leadership with deep technical involvement—you will be expected to make architectural decisions, review designs, and stay close to the code while developing your team’s capabilities. Responsibilities： - Build and lead the Infrastructure Automation team: Hire, mentor, and develop a team of 5 engineers (3 SWE/DevOps + 2 DBA/SWE). Set clear goals, provide regular feedback, conduct performance reviews, and create an environment where engineers do the best work of their careers. Establish team processes, rituals, and culture from scratch. - Define and execute the AI automation strategy: Own the technical vision and roadmap for AI-powered infrastructure agents. Identify the highest-impact automation opportunities across DevOps, SRE, and DBA operations and prioritize ruthlessly. Translate organizational pain points into a concrete engineering backlog. - Build AI agents for DevOps and SRE automation: Lead the design and development of intelligent agents that automate incident response, root cause analysis, infrastructure provisioning, deployment operations, and change management. These agents should correlate signals across logs, metrics, and traces to diagnose and remediate issues autonomously. - Build AI agents for DBA automation: Drive development of agents that automate database operations—schema migration validation, query performance analysis, capacity forecasting, automated backup verification, and self-healing replication management across Airwallex’s database fleet. - Drive infrastructure reliability and operational excellence: Ensure the automation systems the team builds are themselves production-grade, reliable, and well-monitored. Participate in on-call rotations and lead postmortems for P1/P2 incidents. Enforce quality gate standards (80% UT/IT coverage) and change management policies. - Collaborate cross-functionally: Partner with Cloud Infrastructure, SRE, DBA, Observability, and Productivity teams to identify automation targets, integrate with existing systems, and drive adoption of AI-powered tooling. Work with Security and Compliance to ensure automation meets regulatory and change management standards. Minimum qualifications： - 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 2 years in a people management or technical leadership role managing a team of 3+ engineers. - Strong infrastructure and operations background: deep experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Aliyun), Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code practices. - Hands-on experience with SRE practices: incident management, observability (logs, metrics, traces), monitoring systems (Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, Datadog), and operational runbooks. - Strong proficiency in backend programming languages such as Python, Go, Java, or Kotlin, with the ability to contribute to architectural decisions and review code effectively. - Experience with AI/ML technologies or LLM-based systems, with demonstrated ability to apply AI to solve operational or infrastructure problems. - Solid understanding of database systems (relational and NoSQL), with familiarity in DBA operations such as schema management, performance tuning, and capacity planning. - Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with a track record of working effectively across globally distributed teams. Ability to influence without authority and drive adoption of new tooling and practices. Preferred qualifications： - Experience building AI agents, LLM-powered automation pipelines, or intelligent operations (AIOps) systems that interact with production infrastructure. - Deep expertise in database administration and automation (MySQL, PostgreSQL, or similar) at scale, including automated failover, replication management, and self-healing systems. - Track record of building a team from scratch—defining roles, hiring, setting culture, and establishing team processes in a greenfield environment. - Experience with messaging systems (Kafka), data streaming, and distributed systems architecture. - Experience in a fintech, payments, or regulated industry with understanding of change management and compliance requirements for infrastructure changes. - Familiarity with Airwallex’s tech stack or comparable infrastructure: ArgoCD, Rancher, Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus, ELK stack, OpenTelemetry. 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 [Upgrade to PRO to see link] email address. Please apply only through careers.airwallex.com [Upgrade to PRO to see link] 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.