Director, Data Platform Engineering (relocate to Singapore)

📋 Description

• • Airwallex is seeking a visionary Director, Data Platform Engineering to lead the architecture, delivery, and widespread adoption of a sophisticated, governed Data → Knowledge → Skills stack. This pivotal role is instrumental in empowering our global business with advanced analytics, intelligent AI agents, and real-time decision-making capabilities. As a product-facing platform leader, you will be responsible for designing and scaling the semantic and operational layers atop our Databricks Data Lakehouse. Your mandate includes enforcing stringent governance and lineage protocols, and productizing these capabilities to ensure both human analysts and machine agents can reason and act with consistency and confidence.
• • Our evolving data platform is designed to transcend mere data storage, transforming into a structured, scalable, and integrated system. This system is comprised of three tightly interwoven layers, each critical to our data-driven future:
• • Data: This foundational layer focuses on governed, well-modeled, and structured datasets. It encompasses transactional records, event streams, dimensional models, and feature tables. The primary objectives for this layer are to ensure high data quality, robust lineage tracking, and built-in regional compliance. The data must be clean, trusted, and fully queryable, serving as the reliable bedrock for all subsequent layers.
• • Knowledge: This layer introduces a semantic dimension, making data comprehensible and actionable for both humans and machines. It involves defining standardized business metrics, mapping entity relationships, providing contextual documentation, and codifying company-specific domain knowledge. This enables users, whether they are analysts or AI agents, to pose complex questions, such as “What is our net revenue retention in SEA?”, and receive consistent, trustworthy answers without the need to decipher intricate underlying schemas.
• • Skills: This operational layer comprises actionable capabilities that leverage data and knowledge. It includes reusable analytical workflows, agent-callable tools, automated pipelines, API endpoints, and transformation primitives. Collectively, these components serve as the building blocks that empower AI agents and internal teams not only to query information but also to reason, automate processes, and execute tasks reliably and efficiently.
• • We are looking for an exceptional leader capable of architecting and scaling this governed data stack across diverse regions and use cases. A key aspect of this role is ensuring the platform remains accessible and intuitive for a broad range of stakeholders, including Data Science, AI Engineering, and technical business teams. The ultimate goal is to forge a shared, robust foundation that enables both human analysts and AI agents to reason with clarity and act with conviction.
• • A critical responsibility within this position is the ownership of the regional and global data localization strategy within our Databricks environment. This involves architecting solutions that meticulously adhere to regulatory requirements while simultaneously preserving a unified global data model across our priority markets. The platform must adeptly reconcile local compliance constraints with the imperative of global consistency in definitions, metrics, and knowledge artifacts.
• • You will collaborate closely with Data Science, AI Engineering, Product, and Risk teams to ensure the platform effectively supports rapid experimentation, intelligent automation, and high-quality decision-making. Your leadership will be pivotal in transforming raw data into enduring knowledge and deployable skills that drive value across the entire organization.
• • This role offers a unique opportunity to shape the future of data infrastructure at a rapidly growing global fintech company. You will be at the forefront of innovation, driving the adoption of cutting-edge data technologies and methodologies to solve complex business challenges and unlock new opportunities.