Rowan came back to Airwallex for hands-on leadership and the chance to build the global platform powering our next phase of growth.
Rowan is a senior engineer within our Scale Platform team in London. He first joined Airwallex in Singapore when the office was still small, left when his family moved back to the UK, and later returned to help grow our engineering team in London. We asked him what brought him back, what has changed, and why London felt like the right place to rejoin.
Key takeaways
- We’re hiring experienced backend and full-stack engineers, plus engineering leaders as we grow our London engineering team.
- Rowan first joined Airwallex in Singapore when the office had fewer than 10 engineers, then returned in London after two years back in the UK.
- He now works within Scale Platform, supporting enterprise customer use cases across EMEA in close partnership with our Solutions Engineering team in London.
- He came back for the chance to work on harder platform problems, collaborate across regions, and help build our London engineering team from an early stage.
Joining early, when the office was small
When Rowan first joined Airwallex in Singapore, the office was still in its early days, with around 40 to 50 people in total and fewer than ten engineers locally. Since then, both Airwallex and our engineering organisation have grown significantly.
Rowan had been working at a UK company with a small Singapore presence. He felt the integration work he was doing was narrow and wanted something with more depth.
“The Airwallex engineering team was very welcoming and supportive. I joined the technical platform team, which gave me a much stronger technical foundation early in my career than I’d have had otherwise.”
Why he left and what pulled him back
Rowan left Airwallex for family reasons and moved back to the UK, where his family is from. He spent nearly two years at Starling Bank, working on their enterprise banking platform. When a London engineering role at Airwallex opened up, our talent team reached out. What drew him back was the broader scope, the high technical bar, and the chance to help shape a growing engineering hub.
“What’s most exciting to me is that Airwallex is so ambitious. There’s so many areas to work on because the platform has evolved tremendously since I was last here. I’m always impressed and humbled by how talented everyone is, and by the chance to work with many other teams and learn from them.”
What’s changed, and what hasn’t
The Airwallex Rowan came back to is much bigger than the one he left, but he says the engineering culture has stayed much the same.
The platform has grown, and so has the hiring.
“There are a lot more parts of the platform now, with new products and launches happening all the time. That’s been accelerating since I left. There are also many new engineering teams hiring across our global offices.”
There’s room for more kinds of engineers.
“Some teams want someone with a startup background who can go in and build brand new things. Other roles are about taking something that’s already heavily used and keeping it reliable while it keeps evolving.”
Leadership is still hands-on.
“The leadership and management team at Airwallex are still very hands-on. At a lot of fast-growing companies, leaders slowly drift away from the reality on the ground, maybe because there are too many layers. I don’t see that happening here.”
What we’re building in Scale Platform
Rowan came back to work within our Scale Platform team. The team handles many of our enterprise customer use cases, and a lot of those customers are in the EMEA region.
“We work closely with the solutions engineering team in London to help enterprise customers across EMEA integrate with Airwallex. Our team supports our core embedded finance platform, which is trusted by global brands like Brex, SHEIN, and Rippling. This gives engineers a direct line to complex, real-world customer problems. In this role, you might design custom financial architecture tailored for regional platforms, build key compliance-driven flows, or develop entirely new ways to integrate with our APIs, all while helping us grow our engineering presence in London.”
So who is the team looking for?
“The engineers who do best here are comfortable operating with partial context, strong on backend or full-stack system design, and used to working across product, solutions, and engineering. What we’re really looking for is people motivated by building in a still-forming engineering hub, who can turn enterprise requirements into reusable platform improvements.”
The honest part: what’s hard
Engineers respect honesty, so we asked Rowan what’s most challenging about working at Airwallex.
“As the Airwallex platform has grown, so has the range of customers it serves and the complexity of their use cases. Finding the right context across a growing suite of widely used products takes real effort. You need to be proactive, using AI tools to find documentation, talking to the right owners, and moving forward rather than waiting for context to land on your desk”
What it takes to do well here
Rowan’s answer came back to something he picked up from our CEO, Jack Zhang, from a recent company Global All Hands.
“Go deep on how something actually works. Understand how the customer is using it. Even though I’ve worked here before, I tell myself to understand something on a much deeper level. That’s what unblocked me, and it’s also what raises the bar on the quality of work across the team. Jack may have brought this up as advice to succeed as a new hire, but it’s helped me a lot as a re-joiner to the company too, working in an area with complex customer integrations.”
Outside work
Rowan recently moved to Bayswater and is enjoying the Malaysian food nearby. He enjoys playing old PC games in his free time. To keep up with industry trends, he reads The Pragmatic Engineer, and follows startup founders on X.
“Founders are interesting because they’re so frenetic. In the UK we’re more reserved. If someone says they’re dropping out of university to start a company, people expect them to fail. But a lot of them succeed, because they are so passionate and driven.”
Come build with us
Rowan’s journey shows what joining Airwallex London can look like for an experienced engineer. If you want real ownership, strong technical peers, and the chance to help shape a growing team, we’d love to hear from you.
We’re hiring backend and full-stack engineers, and engineering leaders, in London. Click here to see our open roles.
Questions engineers ask us
Is Airwallex hiring engineers in London?
Yes. We’re continuing to grow our engineering team in London, including within Scale Platform, and we’re hiring experienced backend and full-stack engineers as well as engineering leaders. For senior engineers, London is a chance to move quickly, work on problems with real global scale, and help shape what gets built next.
What does the Scale Platform team do?
Scale Platform supports many of Airwallex’s enterprise customer use cases, with a strong focus on customers across the EMEA region. In London, the team works closely with Solutions Engineering to support those customers locally, while also helping grow engineering capability in the region. It is the kind of team where engineers are close to both the technical detail and the real customer problems they are solving.
What kind of engineer does well at Airwallex?
The engineers who do well here are proactive, self-directed, and comfortable working through ambiguity. They go deep on how systems actually work, take time to understand how customers use what they build, and are motivated by solving hard problems rather than waiting for perfect structure or hand-holding. Strong collaboration matters too, especially if you can work effectively across regions, communicate clearly, and keep momentum high in a globally distributed environment.
What’s the engineering culture like at Airwallex?
The culture is welcoming and supportive, and as Rowan says, that part has stayed consistent even as Airwallex has grown significantly. He also points to something many experienced engineers care about: leaders staying hands-on and close to the detail, rather than becoming too removed from the work as the organization scales. In practice, that means an environment where engineers can move quickly, take ownership, and work on technically deep problems with real business impact.
What are the biggest challenges in Engineering at Airwallex?
As the Airwallex platform has grown, so has the number of customers and the complexity of their integrations. Finding the right context across a growing suite of widely used products takes real effort, especially with teams spread across San Francisco, Asia, Australia, and the UK. People who thrive here tend to be proactive, using AI tools to find documentation, talking to the right owners, and moving forward rather than waiting for context to land on their desk.
Why do engineers join and stay at Airwallex?
For Rowan, it comes down to ambition, scope, and people. Engineers join because they want meaningful technical challenges, the chance to learn fast, and the opportunity to shape products and platforms that matter to customers globally. They stay because they get to do that work alongside strong peers, with supportive teams, hands-on leadership, and a culture that still expects depth, ownership, and curiosity as the company scales.
How is Airwallex evolving as an engineering environment?
Rowan's view is that there is now more product breadth, more platform depth, and more room for different kinds of engineering skill sets than when he first joined. There is also a growing story around modern tooling and AI-first engineering. One proof point: AirDev, our internal AI agent, has already shipped more than 440,000 lines of production code, going through the same testing and review process as human engineers, helping free up time for more complex and higher-impact work. It's a sign of an environment built around solving meaningful problems, not repetitive toil.
What is the interview process for engineering roles at Airwallex in London?
For engineering roles in London, candidates can expect the following stages: a coding interview, a system design interview, a hiring manager interview about your career background and project experience, and a bar raiser interview. That final conversation focuses on your motivations, behaviours, fit with our core values and operating principles, and how you use AI in your work. Depending on the role, there may be small variations, but this is the process most engineers should expect.
