Principal Architect, Data Knowledge Platform

📋 Description

• • As a Principal Architect for the Data Knowledge Platform at Airwallex, you will be at the forefront of shaping the future of data and AI within a rapidly growing global fintech company. This is a pivotal role for a senior individual contributor who thrives at the intersection of sophisticated platform architecture, the creation of impactful customer-facing data products, and the strategic enablement of AI capabilities across the organization. Your mandate extends beyond traditional infrastructure management; you are tasked with architecting a robust, governed, and reusable data, knowledge, and skills layer that will serve as the bedrock for advanced analytics, intelligent AI agents, and real-time decision-making systems throughout Airwallex.
• • You will be the primary technical authority, responsible for evolving our data platform from a mere repository of raw data into a sophisticated, multi-layered system designed for maximum utility and intelligence. This involves conceptualizing and implementing three distinct but interconnected layers:
• • Data Layer: Your expertise will be crucial in designing and establishing patterns for governed, well-modeled structured datasets. This encompasses everything from transactional records and event streams to sophisticated dimensional models and feature tables essential for machine learning. A core focus will be ensuring that high data quality, comprehensive lineage tracking, and strict adherence to regional compliance standards are intrinsically embedded within the foundational architecture. The goal is to maintain a clean, trusted, and easily queryable data foundation that serves as a reliable source of truth.
• • Knowledge Layer: This layer is where data transforms into actionable intelligence. You will architect the semantic layer that imbues data with meaning for both human users and machine agents. This includes meticulously defining business metrics, mapping intricate entity relationships, and providing essential contextual documentation. The ultimate objective is to enable any user, whether an analyst or an AI agent, to pose complex questions – such as "what is our net revenue retention in SEA?" – and receive a consistent, accurate, and trustworthy answer without the need to decipher underlying database schemas or complex queries. This layer democratizes data understanding and ensures a unified business narrative.
• • Skills Layer: This layer focuses on operationalizing capabilities that can actively act upon the data and knowledge. You will define the architecture for reusable analytical workflows, agent-callable tools, automated pipelines, and transformation primitives. These components will serve as the fundamental building blocks that empower AI agents and internal teams to reason, analyze, and act reliably and autonomously, moving beyond simple data retrieval to intelligent action.
• • Your responsibilities will be broad and impactful, including owning the technical execution of regional and global data localization strategies within our Databricks environment. You will be instrumental in designing scalable architectural patterns that not only satisfy stringent regulatory requirements but also maintain a unified global data model across our priority markets. A key challenge and opportunity will be reconciling local compliance constraints with the imperative for global consistency in definitions, metrics, and knowledge artifacts, ensuring a harmonized yet compliant data ecosystem.
• • You will foster strong collaborative partnerships with Data Science, AI Engineering, Product Management, and Risk teams, ensuring that the platform effectively supports rapid experimentation, robust model development, and high-quality, data-driven decision-making across the business. Leading global data modeling efforts will be a significant part of your role, focusing on creating unified schemas that are flexible enough to accommodate regional variances and specific market needs.
• • Furthermore, you will be responsible for defining and implementing "Agent Interfaces" – sophisticated APIs and tools that will enable AI agents to seamlessly interact with the Knowledge and Skills layers of the platform. This involves embedding Governance-as-Code principles to ensure that automated data lineage, quality controls, and compliance checks are directly integrated into the data platform, making governance an inherent part of the system rather than an afterthought.
• • This role offers a unique opportunity to influence Airwallex's data strategy at the highest level, driving innovation and ensuring our data infrastructure is not just scalable and compliant, but also intelligent and agent-ready for the future of global finance.