Senior Manager, Operations Strategy, Information Security

About Airwallex

Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. More than 675,000 businesses, including McLaren Racing, Qantas, SHEIN, and TikTok, use us, directly or through our platform partners, to run their financial operations or build and monetize financial products of their own.

We started in Melbourne in 2015 to build the infrastructure global commerce runs on. We're the regulated backbone behind global payments: not by accident, but by design. A decade plus, 85+ licenses, and a financial infrastructure spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.

We're co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, with more than 2,700 people across 27 offices. We hire builders with founder-level energy, people who move fast with good judgment, dig in with real curiosity, and make calls from first principles rather than waiting to be told what to do. Read our operating principles to see it in full.

How you'll make impact

As Senior Manager, Operations Strategy, Information Security, you’ll serve as a strategic and operational partner to the CISO and INFOSEC leadership team, building the planning processes, operating rhythms, reporting mechanisms, and cross-functional programs that help INFOSEC prioritize effectively, manage risk, and improve security maturity. You’ll translate complex technical and risk topics into clear decisions and actionable plans for Security Engineering, IT, Engineering, GRC, Legal, and executive stakeholders. You’ll establish scalable mechanisms for planning, performance management, knowledge sharing, change management, incident learning, and operational improvement, while building, managing, coaching, and growing a team of Technical Program Managers.

• Build and run annual and quarterly planning processes for INFOSEC and IT, including roadmap development, prioritization, resource planning, and risk assessment exercises.

• Coordinate and run QBRs and other operating reviews for INFOSEC and IT, preparing clear narratives on progress, risks, dependencies, decisions, and required leadership actions.

• Implement tracking and reporting for INFOSEC OKRs, key risk indicators, maturity metrics, and operational health measures, embedding security outcomes into company-wide reports and updates.

• Design, document, and continuously improve INFOSEC operating processes covering alert investigations, service requests, incident management, policy updates, and other core workflows.

• Build and maintain a high-quality INFOSEC knowledge base that improves documentation accuracy, supports employee self-service, and enables AI-assisted security workflows.

• Manage complex, cross-functional security and IT programs from strategy through execution, mapping dependencies, aligning stakeholders, driving decisions, and holding teams accountable for outcomes.

• Establish change-management practices that help technical and non-technical teams adopt new security policies, processes, tools, and operating models without creating unnecessary friction for the business.

• Develop dashboards, decision-support mechanisms, and automated workflows that improve visibility, reduce manual effort, and help INFOSEC operate at scale.

• Lead post-incident reviews and operational improvement initiatives, ensuring lessons learned are translated into durable process, control, and automation improvements.

• Build, manage, coach, and develop a team of Technical Program Managers, establishing clear standards for planning, delivery, communication, and operational excellence.

You’ll work from our San Francisco office three days a week.

What we're looking for

Essentials

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience. A top-tier university background is preferred for this role.

• 8+ years of experience in strategy and operations, business operations, technical program management, security programs, or a related field, preferably in a high-growth technology, fintech, payments, or other regulated environment.

• Experience owning complex, cross-functional programs end to end, including planning, dependency mapping, stakeholder alignment, execution tracking, risk management, and executive reporting.

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to deconstruct ambiguous problems, challenge assumptions, evaluate trade-offs, and recommend pragmatic solutions.

• Exceptional written, verbal, and presentation skills, with the ability to communicate credibly with engineers and translate complex technical or risk topics for non-technical executives.

• Demonstrated experience designing operating rhythms and performance-management mechanisms, such as annual planning, quarterly planning, OKRs, KPIs, QBRs, risk reviews, or executive dashboards.

• Experience leading, coaching, or developing program managers or other operational professionals.

• Strong ownership and self-direction, with a track record of identifying priorities, building structure in ambiguous environments, and delivering measurable outcomes without relying on detailed direction.

Preferred

• Experience serving as chief of staff to a CISO, CTO, senior security leader, or comparable technology executive, or experience leading strategy and operations within an INFOSEC organization.

• Experience with information security, technology risk, governance, compliance, incident management, operational resilience, or security maturity programs.

• Familiarity with security operating models and workflows spanning security engineering, corporate IT, GRC, risk management, identity and access management, endpoint security, vulnerability management, or incident response.

• Experience translating regulatory, audit, privacy, or risk requirements into practical policies, processes, controls, and operating mechanisms in a financial services or payments environment.

• Experience building automation-first operating processes, knowledge-management systems, or AI-assisted workflows that improve the leverage of security and technical teams.

• Comfort operating in a high-growth environment with high standards, rapid iteration cycles, evolving priorities, and significant ambiguity.

• Demonstrated alignment with Airwallex INFOSEC competencies, including grit, critical thinking, curiosity, impact orientation, and ownership.

You'll thrive here if

• You’re comfortable owning the roadmap yourself.

• You’re comfortable making decisions with incomplete information and moving quickly anyway.

• You connect dots across functions and hold the big picture without losing grip on the details.

• You simplify complexity rather than hiding behind it.

• You value in-person collaboration and are happy being in the office three days a week.

Learn more about your team

InfoSec at Airwallex runs one of the most modern security teams in the world, protecting hundreds of thousands of customers and hundreds of billions of dollars. Our scale, funding, and industry make us a real target, so we skip the standard playbook of off-the-shelf tools and tiered SOC analysts and build almost everything ourselves, often with AI ahead of the rest of the industry. You'll go back to first principles constantly, because the off-the-shelf answer is rarely right for us, and we can build better than what already exists. If you want to build security from the ground up, against a real adversary, with people who are actually good at this, this is the team for you.

Applicant Safety Policy: Fraud and Third-Party Recruiters

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.

…