Staff Data Scientist (Financial Crime AI)

Company

Airwallex provides an integrated payments and financial platform for global businesses, including business accounts, payments, spend management, treasury, and embedded finance.

What you will do

• Lead the data science strategy for AML and financial crime risk controls across Risk Product.
• Develop proactive detection capabilities for emerging threats, suspicious behavior, control gaps, and unknown financial crime patterns.
• Build and scale AI-powered screening, graph and network intelligence, entity resolution, and machine learning solutions.
• Advance name screening, transaction monitoring, and detection of coordinated fraud and financial crime activity.
• Partner with Risk Product, Engineering, Financial Crime Compliance, and Risk Operations to deliver scalable production controls.
• Influence the Risk Product roadmap through technical leadership, reusable frameworks, and mentoring.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in data science, machine learning, applied AI, risk analytics, or a related quantitative field, with Staff, Lead, or equivalent scope.
• Strong expertise in applied machine learning and modern AI, including building and productionizing data-driven solutions at scale.
• Experience with NLP/LLMs, entity resolution, information retrieval, graph or network analytics, anomaly detection, or risk scoring.
• Strong SQL and Python skills.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills across Product, Engineering, Risk, Operations, and Compliance.

Nice to have

• Experience in fintech, payments, banking, marketplaces, or another regulated or high-risk domain.
• Experience with AML, financial crime, sanctions, PEP screening, adverse media, fraud, trust and safety, or transaction monitoring.
• Experience building name screening or adverse media systems.
• Familiarity with LLM evaluation, prompt and model experimentation, retrieval quality assessment, and AI observability.
• Experience applying graph analytics to detect mule networks, collusive behavior, coordinated account activity, or interconnected high-risk entities.

Culture & Benefits

• Work alongside more than 2,300 people across 27 global offices.
• Ownership, rapid learning, collaboration, and founder-like energy are valued.
• Use AI to work more efficiently and solve complex problems.
• Equal opportunity employment with accommodation available for applicants with disabilities or special needs.