Associate Director, Obligations Management

Airwallex is the only unified payments and financial platform for global businesses. Powered by our unique combination of proprietary infrastructure and software, we empower over 200,000 businesses worldwide – including Brex, Rippling, Navan, Qantas, SHEIN and many more – with fully integrated solutions to manage everything from business accounts, payments, spend management and treasury, to embedded finance at a global scale.

Proudly founded in Melbourne, we have a team of over 2,200 of the brightest and most innovative people in tech across 26 offices around the globe. Valued at US$8 billion and backed by world-leading investors including T. Rowe Price, Visa, Mastercard, Robinhood Ventures, Sequoia, Salesforce Ventures, DST Global, and Lone Pine Capital, Airwallex is leading the charge in building the global payments and financial platform of the future. If you’re ready to do the most ambitious work of your career, join us.

We hire successful builders with founder-like energy who want real impact, accelerated learning, and true ownership. You bring strong role-related expertise and sharp thinking, and you’re motivated by our mission and operating principles. You move fast with good judgment, dig deep with curiosity, and make decisions from first principles, balancing speed and rigor.

You're humble and collaborative; turn zero‑to‑one ideas into real products, and you “get stuff done” end-to-end. You use AI to work smarter and solve problems faster. Here, you’ll tackle complex, high‑visibility problems with exceptional teammates and grow your career as we build the future of global banking. If that sounds like you, let’s build what’s next.

About the team

The Regulatory & Compliance team helps Airwallex grow responsibly as a global financial platform. We work at the intersection of law, regulation, risk, and business execution, partnering closely with teams across the company to navigate complexity, enable growth, and protect the trust our customers, partners, and regulators place in us. It’s a team for people who are thoughtful, practical, and energized by solving hard problems in a fast-moving, highly regulated environment.

What you'll do

As the Associate Director, Obligations Management, you will own the central governance infrastructure that identifies, catalogs, and tracks regulatory and financial partner requirements across Airwallex’s footprint. Sitting as a global central team, you will lead the architecture and maintenance of the global obligations register, mapping complex statutory and clearing-partner mandates directly to internal compliance controls.

You will also oversee the institutional RFI knowledge base and the central global audit register, ensuring traceability of control performance and tracking issue lifecycles through to verified closure. You will partner extensively with Regional Regulatory Legal, Local Regulatory Compliance, Internal Audit, and Second-Line Risk teams to transform abstract legal mandates into a structured, data-driven, and audit-ready compliance inventory.

This role holds a global mandate and can be based in the US or EMEA.

Responsibilities

• Architect, scale, and maintain the central Global Obligations Register, comprehensively cataloging all international regulatory rules, statutory laws, and Tier-1 financial partner requirements alongside their respective compliance controls.

• Collaborate closely with the Risk team to ensure all mapped compliance controls and reporting obligations within the registry are structured effectively for independent monitoring, validation, and testing.

• Manage and continuously evolve the centralized global RFI knowledge base, synthesizing data and insights from local Regulatory Compliance teams to curate uniform, legally defensible evidence portfolios for banking partners and regulatory bodies.

• Own the global central audit register, tracking internal audit findings, external examination gaps, and material regulatory issues to drive accountability and verify robust root-cause remediation before deadlines.

• Partner with Regional Regulatory Legal teams to ingest ongoing legal interpretations and horizon scanning data, ensuring the global obligations registry is dynamically updated to prevent compliance gaps or control drift.

• Direct and scale a high-performing obligations management team, replacing manual trackers and spreadsheet dependencies with advanced, scalable GRC tooling and automated compliance dashboards.

Who you are

We're looking for people who meet the minimum requirements for this role. The preferred qualifications are great to have, but are not mandatory.

Minimum qualifications

• 10 to 12+ years of experience within corporate governance, regulatory compliance, internal audit, or operational risk management inside a highly regulated financial services, fintech, or banking environment

• At least 3 to 5+ years of experience managing a compliance inventory, regulatory obligations framework, or GRC program at a senior level within a multi-jurisdictional environment

• Proven track record of constructing complex compliance matrices, mapping internal controls to international laws, supervising audit registers, and managing institutional RFI mechanisms

• A high-ownership, systematic approach to problem-solving, with exceptional corporate drafting skills and the cross-functional agility to align decentralized regional teams with central hub standards
  

Preferred qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Law, Public Policy, Risk Management, Business Administration, or a related structured analytical discipline

• Juris Doctor (JD), Master of Laws (LLM), or a Master's degree in Regulatory Compliance, Risk Management, or Business Administration

• Professional designations such as Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS), Certified Internal Auditor (CIA), or equivalent GRC-related credentials

• Deep experience working within a high-growth cross-border payments company, top-tier neobank, or API-driven digital platform handling high volumes of regulated transactions

• Direct experience selecting, deploying, or configuring institutional Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) software systems to automate policy mapping and issue remediation workflows
  

To protect you from recruitment scams, please be aware that Airwallex will not ask for bank details, sensitive ID numbers (i.e. passport), or any form of payment during the application or interview process. All official communication will come from an @airwallex.com email address. Please apply only through careers.airwallex.com or our official LinkedIn page.

Airwallex does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firms/recruiters. Airwallex will not pay any fees to search firms/recruiters if a candidate is submitted by a search firm/recruiter unless an agreement has been entered into with respect to specific open position(s). Search firms/recruiters submitting resumes to Airwallex on an unsolicited basis shall be deemed to accept this condition, regardless of any other provision to the contrary.

Airwallex is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and anyone seeking employment at Airwallex is considered based on merit, qualifications, competence and talent. We don’t regard color, religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, ancestry, citizenship, sex, marital or family status, disability, gender, or any other legally protected status when making our hiring decisions. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.