Senior Software Engineer, Database SRE

Postgres
UNITED STATES
October 23, 2026
Full Time
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Job Description

Company: Airwallex
Location: Seattle, WA
Workplace Type: Hybrid (3 days/week in office: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday)
Employment Type: Full-time
Pay / Compensation: $140,000 – $240,000

About the Role

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Database SRE team, you will design and build the platforms, automation, and AI-driven tooling powering Airwallex’s database infrastructure. You will work across PostgreSQL, Google CloudSQL, Redis, Google Memorystore, and GCP to solve complex challenges at the intersection of database reliability engineering, platform automation, and AI. Your work will directly improve the availability, performance, security, and operational scalability of the data layer supporting Airwallex’s global payments platform.

What You’ll Do / Key Responsibilities

  • Build Observability Infrastructure: Develop a unified database observability platform providing real-time visibility into availability, security posture, reliability metrics, and query latency across database fleets.
  • Design AI Agent Interfaces: Create secure Model Context Protocol (MCP) interfaces enabling AI agents to interact with and query production databases under strict access controls.
  • Automate DBA Operations: Develop an agentic AI DBA to streamline performance tuning, capacity planning, schema reviews, incident triage, and remediation.
  • Self-Service Platform Engineering: Create self-service workflows that empower product engineering teams to provision, configure, scale, and manage PostgreSQL and Redis instances with automated security and compliance guardrails.
  • Drive Database Reliability: Establish and maintain core reliability practices across connection pooling, query optimization, backup and recovery, failover, and change management, including participation in on-call rotations for database incidents.
  • Architectural Guidance: Partner with product engineers to diagnose performance bottlenecks, review schema designs, and improve data modeling and access patterns.

Requirements & Qualifications

  • 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with strong proficiency in a backend language such as Python, Go, Java, or Kotlin.
  • Deep PostgreSQL Expertise: Hands-on operational experience with PostgreSQL, covering performance tuning, query optimization, replication, backup and recovery, schema design, and production reliability best practices.
  • In-Memory & Caching Technologies: Hands-on experience with Redis, including data modeling, clustering, persistence strategies, and operational administration.
  • Cloud & Infrastructure as Code: Strong experience with GCP (or equivalent cloud platform), Terraform, Kubernetes, and Docker.
  • Operational Automation: Proven track record of designing tooling, automation, and platforms that replace manual operational work and scale database fleet management.
  • System Design: Strong system design and architecture skills focused on building resilient, scalable infrastructure services.

Preferred / Bonus Qualifications

  • Experience with Google CloudSQL and/or Google Memorystore.
  • Experience designing and building internal developer platforms, Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) platforms, or self-service infrastructure tooling.
  • Experience with AI/ML integration, LLM applications, or AI-powered automation for infrastructure management.
  • Familiarity with MCP or comparable patterns for programmatic access to production systems.
  • Experience with observability platforms such as Grafana, Prometheus, or Datadog.
  • Domain experience in fintech, payments, or regulated industries where strict data integrity, security, and compliance are paramount.

Benefits & Perks

  • Competitive salary range: $140,000 – $240,000
  • Comprehensive health, wellness, and retirement benefits
  • Opportunity to shape core database infrastructure for a high-growth global fintech enterprise

Airwallex is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All employment decisions are made based on business needs, job requirements, and individual qualifications without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran status, or disability status.

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