Director, Knowledge Platform Engineering

📋 Description

• • Airwallex is seeking a visionary Director, Knowledge Platform Engineering to be based in Singapore, a pivotal role focused on architecting, delivering, and championing the adoption of a sophisticated, governed, and reusable Data → Knowledge → Skills stack. This platform is designed to be the engine powering advanced analytics, intelligent AI agents, and real-time decision-making across the entire organization. This is a highly strategic, product-facing leadership position that demands a blend of deep technical expertise and strong product vision.
• • You will be instrumental in designing and scaling the crucial semantic and operational layers that sit atop our robust Data Lakehouse, built on Databricks. A core responsibility will be to enforce stringent data governance, ensure comprehensive data lineage, and effectively productize these capabilities. The ultimate goal is to empower both human analysts and sophisticated machine agents to reason, understand, and act upon data with unparalleled consistency and trust.
• • Our evolving platform is moving beyond simple data storage into a meticulously structured and scalable system. This system comprises three tightly integrated layers, each with distinct but interconnected responsibilities:
• • Data Layer: This foundational layer will house governed, well-modeled, and structured datasets. It will encompass transactional records, event streams, dimensional models, and feature tables. The emphasis here is on delivering high-quality data, maintaining robust lineage, and ensuring built-in regional compliance. This layer must be clean, trusted, and fully queryable, providing a reliable source of truth.
• • Knowledge Layer: This semantic layer is designed to imbue data with meaning, making it comprehensible and actionable for both human users and machine agents. It will feature standardized business metric definitions, clear entity relationships, contextual documentation, and essential company-specific domain knowledge. This layer will enable users to ask 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 Layer: This layer focuses on operationalized capabilities that leverage data and knowledge. It will include reusable analytical workflows, tools callable by AI agents, automated data pipelines, robust API endpoints, and essential transformation primitives. Collectively, these components will form the building blocks that allow AI agents and internal teams not only to query information but also to reason, automate complex processes, and execute tasks reliably and efficiently.
• • We are actively searching for a leader with the proven ability to architect and scale this governed stack across diverse regions and a multitude of use cases. Crucially, this leader must ensure the platform remains accessible, intuitive, and user-friendly for Data Science, AI Engineering, and technical business stakeholders. The overarching objective is to cultivate a shared, unified foundation that empowers both human analysts and AI agents to reason with consistency and act with unwavering confidence.
• • A critical and non-negotiable component of this role is complete ownership of the regional and global data localization strategy within our Databricks environment. This involves meticulously designing architectural patterns that not only satisfy stringent regulatory requirements but also preserve a unified global data model across all priority markets. The platform must adeptly reconcile local compliance constraints with the imperative of global consistency in definitions, metrics, and knowledge artifacts.
• • You will foster close partnerships with Data Science, AI Engineering, Product, and Risk teams. This collaboration is essential to ensure the platform effectively supports rapid experimentation, intelligent automation initiatives, and the generation of high-quality, data-driven decision-making. Your leadership will transform raw data into durable, actionable knowledge and deployable, impactful skills across the entire organization.
• • This role offers a unique opportunity to shape the future of data and AI at Airwallex, driving innovation and enabling the company to leverage its data assets more effectively than ever before. You will be at the forefront of building a world-class knowledge platform that underpins our global operations and strategic growth.