What is a Engineering Manager at Airwallex Pty?

As an Engineering Manager at Airwallex Pty, you are stepping into a pivotal leadership role at the heart of a rapidly scaling global financial infrastructure platform. Airwallex Pty empowers businesses to operate anywhere, anytime, by providing cross-border payments, foreign exchange, and sophisticated financial APIs. In this role, you are not just managing engineers; you are driving the technical execution and organizational health of teams that build mission-critical systems processing billions of dollars globally.

Your impact spans across products, users, and the fundamental business strategy. You will guide engineering squads to design highly available, secure, and scalable distributed systems. Whether your team is optimizing core payment routing algorithms, building out robust ledger systems, or enhancing developer-facing APIs, your leadership ensures that technical delivery aligns perfectly with rapid business growth and stringent regulatory requirements.

This position is uniquely challenging and rewarding due to the sheer scale and complexity of the fintech domain. You will navigate the intersection of rapid startup-like iteration and the rigorous compliance required in financial services. Expect to be a strategic influencer, balancing technical debt with feature velocity, mentoring top-tier engineering talent, and collaborating extensively with global stakeholders across product, operations, and sales.

Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Preparation is the key to navigating the rigorous interview loop at Airwallex Pty. We look for leaders who are technically deep, operationally excellent, and culturally aligned with our fast-paced, global environment.

Technical Leadership – You must demonstrate a strong architectural understanding of distributed systems and scalable backend infrastructure. Interviewers evaluate your ability to guide technical decisions, review architectures, and ensure your team builds resilient, high-performance software. You can show strength here by discussing past trade-offs you have made between speed to market and system reliability.

People Management – This evaluates your ability to build, retain, and grow high-performing engineering teams. We look for your strategies in mentoring engineers, managing performance, and fostering an inclusive engineering culture. Strong candidates provide concrete examples of how they have navigated team conflicts, delivered constructive feedback, and scaled their teams during periods of rapid growth.

Cross-Functional Collaboration – Engineering at Airwallex Pty does not happen in a silo. You will be evaluated on your ability to partner effectively with product managers, operational leaders, and even global sales teams. You demonstrate this by showing how you translate complex technical constraints into business language and how you negotiate roadmaps with diverse stakeholders.

Execution and Delivery – We assess your operational rigor. Interviewers want to know how you run agile processes, manage project risks, and ensure consistent, high-quality delivery. Highlighting your experience in implementing engineering metrics, improving CI/CD pipelines, and driving incident management will set you apart.

Interview Process Overview

The interview process for an Engineering Manager at Airwallex Pty is designed to be thorough, assessing both your technical depth and your leadership capabilities across a global context. The progression typically moves from high-level alignment to deep-dive assessments, reflecting the multifaceted nature of the role. The difficulty is generally considered average to high, requiring a solid mix of engineering fundamentals and seasoned management experience.

You will typically experience a four-stage process. It begins with a foundational phone screen focusing on your background, basic management philosophy, and mutual fit. This is followed by a face-to-face (or comprehensive virtual) interview where you will dive deep into system design, architecture, and behavioral leadership scenarios. What makes the Airwallex Pty process distinctive is its emphasis on cross-functional and global alignment; you should expect subsequent rounds with senior leadership, such as a VP of Engineering, and uniquely, a cross-functional interview with a stakeholder from another region—like a member of the Sales team based in the USA.

This structure reflects our highly collaborative, borderless working culture. The emphasis is on how you communicate complex ideas across different time zones, disciplines, and business units, ensuring that engineering efforts directly support global commercial goals.

The visual timeline above outlines the typical stages of your interview journey, from the initial recruiter screen through to the final cross-functional and executive interviews. Use this to pace your preparation, ensuring you are ready to pivot from highly technical architectural discussions in the middle stages to strategic, business-focused conversations in the final rounds. Note that because Airwallex Pty operates globally, you may need to accommodate different time zones for your final interviews.

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

Technical System Design & Architecture

While you may not be writing production code daily, an Engineering Manager at Airwallex Pty must command the respect of senior engineers and guide critical architectural choices. This area evaluates your ability to design scalable, fault-tolerant, and secure distributed systems, which is paramount in the fintech space. Strong performance means you can confidently sketch out high-level architectures, identify bottlenecks, and make pragmatic trade-offs regarding data consistency, latency, and throughput.

Be ready to go over:

• Microservices Architecture – Designing decoupled services, API gateways, and service meshes.
• Data Storage and Consistency – Choosing between SQL and NoSQL, understanding ACID properties, and managing distributed transactions (e.g., Saga pattern).
• High Availability and Resilience – Implementing rate limiting, circuit breakers, and failover strategies.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Event sourcing, CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation), and idempotency in payment processing.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Design a high-throughput, low-latency payment routing system."
• "How would you architect a distributed ledger that guarantees eventual consistency across multiple global regions?"
• "Walk me through a time you had to resolve a critical architectural disagreement within your team."

People Leadership & Team Building

Your primary responsibility is to your team. This area tests your emotional intelligence, coaching skills, and organizational design abilities. Interviewers want to see that you can attract top talent, manage underperformers gracefully, and create an environment where engineers thrive. A strong candidate provides nuanced, empathetic answers that focus on individual growth and team cohesion.

Be ready to go over:

• Hiring and Scaling – Strategies for sourcing, interviewing, and onboarding engineers in a competitive market.
• Performance Management – Conducting effective 1-on-1s, setting OKRs, and guiding engineers through promotion cycles.
• Conflict Resolution – Navigating interpersonal issues or disagreements over technical direction.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time you had to manage out an underperforming engineer."
• "How do you balance the need for rapid feature delivery with an engineer's desire to work on technical debt or learn a new technology?"
• "Describe your framework for running effective 1-on-1s."

Cross-Functional & Global Stakeholder Management

At Airwallex Pty, engineering is deeply intertwined with product, operations, and sales. Because our products serve global markets, you will frequently interact with stakeholders across different continents and disciplines. This area evaluates your communication skills, business acumen, and ability to push back constructively. Strong candidates show they can align engineering goals with overarching business metrics.

Be ready to go over:

• Roadmap Negotiation – Balancing product requests with engineering capacity and technical debt.
• Cross-Border Communication – Managing expectations and collaborating with teams in different time zones (e.g., aligning London engineering with US sales).
• Incident Communication – How you communicate technical outages or delays to non-technical stakeholders.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time you had to say 'no' to a demanding stakeholder from the Sales or Product team."
• "How do you ensure your engineering team understands the commercial impact of what they are building?"
• "Describe a scenario where you had to align priorities between two teams located in different global regions."

Delivery & Agile Execution

This area focuses on the mechanics of how your team gets work done. Interviewers will assess your operational rigor and how you optimize the software development lifecycle (SDLC). A strong candidate demonstrates a data-driven approach to engineering management, using metrics to identify bottlenecks and improve velocity without sacrificing quality.

Be ready to go over:

• Agile Methodologies – Adapting Scrum or Kanban to fit the team's specific needs.
• Engineering Metrics – Tracking DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, MTTR, change failure rate).
• Quality Assurance – Integrating testing, CI/CD, and security reviews into the delivery pipeline.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "What metrics do you use to measure the health and productivity of your engineering team?"
• "Walk me through a project that was falling behind schedule. How did you intervene to get it back on track?"
• "How do you ensure security and compliance are built into the development process rather than treated as an afterthought?"

Key Responsibilities

As an Engineering Manager at Airwallex Pty, your day-to-day work is a dynamic mix of strategic planning, technical oversight, and team mentorship. You will spend a significant portion of your time conducting 1-on-1s, coaching engineers, and unblocking your team so they can execute efficiently. You are responsible for the overall health of your squad, ensuring that morale is high and that every engineer has a clear path for career progression.

Beyond people management, you will act as the technical anchor for your team. While you will not be submitting pull requests daily, you will lead architecture review meetings, guide technical design documents, and ensure that the systems being built are robust enough to handle the scale of global financial transactions. You will partner closely with Staff and Principal Engineers to ensure your team's architecture aligns with the broader Airwallex Pty technical vision.

Collaboration is a massive part of the role. You will work hand-in-hand with Product Managers to define roadmaps, scope projects, and sprint plans. Furthermore, you will frequently interface with global stakeholders, such as regional Sales Directors or Operations Leads, to ensure that the engineering deliverables are meeting customer needs and compliance standards across different jurisdictions. Your ability to translate complex technical constraints into clear business timelines is critical to your success here.

Role Requirements & Qualifications

To thrive as an Engineering Manager at Airwallex Pty, you need a blend of deep technical expertise and proven leadership experience. The ideal candidate has transitioned from a senior individual contributor role into management and understands the unique pressures of building high-availability fintech systems.

• Must-have skills – Proven experience managing software engineering teams (typically 3+ years in management).
• Must-have skills – Strong architectural background in building scalable, distributed backend systems (often utilizing Java, Kotlin, or Go).
• Must-have skills – Exceptional communication skills, with a track record of collaborating effectively with non-technical stakeholders like Product and Sales.
• Must-have skills – Experience driving agile delivery processes and managing the full software development lifecycle.
• Nice-to-have skills – Direct experience in the fintech, payments, or banking infrastructure sectors.
• Nice-to-have skills – Familiarity with global compliance and security standards (e.g., PCI-DSS).
• Nice-to-have skills – Experience managing distributed teams across multiple time zones.

Common Interview Questions

The following questions represent the types of inquiries you can expect during your Airwallex Pty interviews. They are designed to illustrate the patterns of our evaluation process rather than serve as a strict memorization list. Focus on the underlying competencies each question targets.

People and Team Management

This category tests your ability to nurture talent, manage performance, and build a healthy engineering culture.

• Describe a time you successfully coached an engineer through a major promotion.
• How do you handle a situation where two senior engineers fundamentally disagree on a system architecture?
• Walk me through your process for onboarding a new engineer to ensure they are productive quickly.
• Tell me about a time you had to deliver difficult performance feedback. How did you structure the conversation?
• How do you foster an inclusive and collaborative culture within a remote or hybrid team?

System Design and Technical Leadership

These questions evaluate your architectural pragmatism and your ability to guide technical decision-making at scale.

• Design a scalable ledger system that can process thousands of transactions per second with strict consistency.
• How do you evaluate when to build a solution in-house versus integrating a third-party vendor?
• Walk me through a time your team experienced a severe production outage. How did you manage the incident and the post-mortem?
• Explain how you approach technical debt. How do you convince product managers to allocate time for it?
• Design an API rate-limiting service for our public-facing developer platform.

Cross-Functional and Stakeholder Alignment

This category assesses your business acumen and ability to partner with global, non-engineering teams.

• Tell me about a time you had to push back on a critical request from the Sales team. How did you manage the relationship?
• How do you communicate a significant delay in a project timeline to executive stakeholders?
• Describe a project where you had to collaborate with teams in different time zones. What were the challenges, and how did you overcome them?
• Give an example of how you have aligned your engineering team's goals with the broader company revenue targets.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How technical are the interviews for an Engineering Manager at Airwallex Pty? While you will not be asked to solve complex algorithmic coding puzzles on a whiteboard, you must be highly proficient in system design and architecture. You are expected to hold your own in deep technical discussions, evaluate trade-offs, and prove that you can effectively review and guide the technical work of senior engineers.

Q: How should I prepare for the cross-functional interview with the Sales team? Focus on empathy and communication. The Sales team wants to know that you understand customer pain points and can translate commercial urgency into engineering action. Prepare examples of how you have successfully partnered with customer-facing teams to deliver features that directly impacted revenue or client satisfaction.

Q: What is the typical timeline from the first phone screen to an offer? The process usually moves quickly, typically spanning 3 to 5 weeks from the initial recruiter call to the final offer. Because interviews often involve stakeholders in different global regions (like the US, UK, or APAC), scheduling can occasionally extend the timeline slightly.

Q: What differentiates a good candidate from a great candidate? Great candidates exhibit a "founder's mentality." They do not just manage tickets; they deeply understand the business context of what they are building. A standout candidate will articulate how their technical and operational decisions directly drive business growth, and they will show a high degree of comfort navigating the ambiguity of a fast-scaling global company.

Q: Does Airwallex Pty support remote or hybrid work for this role? Airwallex Pty generally operates on a hybrid model, valuing in-person collaboration while offering flexibility. However, because you will be managing global teams and coordinating with international stakeholders, a high degree of flexibility regarding working hours and communication styles is essential.

Other General Tips

• Master the STAR Method: When answering behavioral questions, strictly adhere to the Situation, Task, Action, Result format. Airwallex Pty interviewers appreciate concise, data-backed answers. Always highlight the specific Action you took as a leader, rather than just what the team accomplished.

• Embrace the Global Mindset: Demonstrate your awareness of the challenges and opportunities of operating a global platform. Mentioning considerations like data sovereignty, cross-border latency, or managing distributed teams will show you are aligned with the company's operational reality.

• Prepare for Ambiguity: Fintech is heavily regulated and constantly evolving. You will likely be presented with open-ended scenario questions. Do not rush to an answer; ask clarifying questions to define the scope, constraints, and business goals before proposing a solution.

• Showcase Your Mentorship: Have specific, detailed stories ready about how you have grown talent. Airwallex Pty values leaders who build leaders. Speak passionately about how you identify potential in your engineers and the structured steps you take to elevate their careers.

Summary & Next Steps

Securing an Engineering Manager position at Airwallex Pty is an opportunity to lead top-tier engineering talent at the forefront of global financial technology. You will be challenged to balance rapid product innovation with the uncompromising reliability required in the payments sector. This role offers immense visibility and the chance to directly influence the infrastructure that powers businesses worldwide.

To succeed in your interviews, focus your preparation on mastering distributed system design, articulating your people management philosophies, and demonstrating your ability to collaborate seamlessly across global, cross-functional teams. Remember to ground your answers in concrete examples, highlighting your operational rigor and your capacity to align engineering outcomes with strategic business goals.

The compensation data above provides a benchmark for the total rewards package you can expect, which typically includes a competitive base salary, performance bonuses, and equity components. Keep in mind that exact figures will vary based on your location, experience level, and the specific scope of the team you will be leading.

Approach your interviews with confidence and curiosity. The team at Airwallex Pty is looking for partners who are as passionate about building great teams as they are about building great software. Take the time to review additional resources and interview insights on Dataford to refine your strategy. You have the experience and the leadership capabilities to excel—now it is time to showcase them. Good luck!