Principal Software Engineer, Backend

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 150,000 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 1,700 of the brightest and most innovative people in tech across 26 offices around the globe. Valued at US$6.2 billion and backed by world-leading investors including Visa, Airtree, Blackbird, Sequoia, DST Global, Greenoaks, Salesforce Ventures, Lone Pine, and Square Peg, 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. About the Role We're looking for a seasoned Principal Engineer to take full ownership of Airwallex's edge networking stack -including API gateway, CDN, DNS, Global Accelerators, and traffic control services. This is a high-impact P5 architect role at the intersection of platform engineering, security, and product velocity. You'll define the blueprint, lead implementation, and enforce governance for how all external traffic reaches and interacts with our platform globally. Responsibilities Own the Edge Network Stack Design and evolve the architecture for Airwallex's external traffic stack including: API Gateways (routing, filtering, throttling) DNS services (global resolution & routing) CDNs (caching strategies and invalidation) Global Accelerators (latency and route optimization) Define and Enforce Border Security Partner with InfoSec to design and operationalize: DDoS protection , bot mitigation, and anomaly detection (e.g., Cloud Armor, WAF) Rate limiting and QoS policy enforcement for prioritized customer/partner APIs Firewall rule governance and bad actor prevention mechanisms Intrusion Prevention and Auth mechanisms at the border Policy-Driven API Route Management Build end-to-end processes and tooling for how engineers expose public APIs: Define policy and controls for route registration, approval, and change management Work with platform teams to enforce compliance across microservices and gateways Contribute to internal tools for observability, access review, and lifecycle auditing Enable Global-Scale, Secure Performance Establish reliability and quality of service (QoS) goals for critical paths (e.g., payments, onboarding, auth) Design for hybrid/multi-cloud edge strategy and backbone traffic replication Tune latency, failover, and availability posture across regions What We're Looking For Technical Skills Deep experience in cloud-native edge networking (API Gateway, DNS, CDN, GA, firewalls) Proficiency with SDN concepts and tools (e.g., OpenDaylight, Envoy, NGINX/OpenResty, Kong, Apisix) Familiar with Cloudflare , AWS or GCP Cloud Networking , techniques Knowledge of hybrid/multi-cloud patterns and traffic engineering at scale Hands-on with cloud firewall systems, WAF, rate limiting, and bot detection Strategic Capabilities A security-aware mindset with ability to balance protection and developer experience Experience defining cross-team processes and governance frameworks Strong communication skills and ability to lead across engineering and security teams Bonus Experience supporting financial or regulated workloads Familiarity with Kubernetes traffic management frameworks 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. 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.