Senior Software Engineer - Database

Airwallex's Database team sits within the Infrastructure division and is responsible for the reliability, performance, security, and automation of Airwallex's database infrastructure — primarily Postgres (Google CloudSQL), Redis (Google Memorystore), Clickhouse and many more. The team's mission is to make databases invisible: product engineers should be able to provision, scale, and operate databases safely without needing to become database experts themselves. Today the team has 4 engineers across Singapore and China. We are expanding to Seattle to build a truly global team and to tackle the next generation of database automation — including AI-powered database operations, self-service platforms, and unified observability. You will join a team that values engineering rigor, automation-first thinking, and a bias toward building tools over performing manual toil.

Responsibilities

Build a unified database observability platform: Design and implement an eagle-eye view across all database instances, providing real-time visibility into availability, security posture, reliability metrics, and latency — enabling proactive issue detection before incidents occur; Build MCP (Model Context Protocol) for safe AI agent access: Design and implement secure interfaces that allow AI agents to safely query and interact with production databases, enabling the next generation of AI-powered internal tooling while maintaining strict security and access control; Build an Agentic AI DBA: Develop AI-powered automation that handles routine DBA tasks — performance tuning, capacity planning, schema review, incident triage, and remediation — reducing manual toil and enabling the team to scale operations without scaling headcount; Build self-service database platform: Create tooling that enables product engineering teams to provision, configure, scale, and manage Postgres and Redis instances through self-service workflows, with built-in guardrails for security, compliance, and best practices; Drive database reliability and operational excellence: Establish and enforce database best practices across the organization — connection pooling, query optimization, backup/restore strategies, failover procedures, and change management. Participate in on-call rotations for database incidents; Collaborate with engineering teams: Partner with product engineers to diagnose database performance issues, review schema designs, and provide guidance on data modeling and access patterns for Postgres and Redis

Requirements

5+ years of professional software engineering experience with strong proficiency in backend languages such as Python, Go, Java, or Kotlin; Deep experience with PostgreSQL — performance tuning, query optimization, replication, backup/recovery, schema design, and operational best practices; Experience with Redis — data modeling, clustering, persistence strategies, and operational management; Infrastructure and cloud expertise: Hands-on experience with GCP (or equivalent cloud provider), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), Kubernetes, and Docker; Demonstrated track record of building automation, tooling, or platforms that replaced manual operational work — not just operating databases, but engineering solutions that make operations scalable; Strong system design skills, with the ability to architect reliable, scalable infrastructure services

Nice to have

Experience with Google CloudSQL and/or Google Memorystore specifically; Experience building internal developer platforms, database-as-a-service systems, or self-service infrastructure tooling; Experience with AI/ML technologies, LLM integration, or building AI-powered automation — particularly applied to infrastructure or operations use cases; Familiarity with MCP (Model Context Protocol) or similar patterns for safe programmatic access to production systems; Experience with observability tools (Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog) and building monitoring/alerting systems for database infrastructure; Experience in fintech, payments, or other regulated industries where data integrity, security, and compliance are critical