Staff Software Engineer (AI Growth)

Location: San Francisco; hybrid work from the Seattle office three days a week

Base salary: $182,000–$310,000 per year, plus potential equity and bonus

Company

Airwallex provides an AI-native financial operating system and regulated global payments infrastructure for businesses and financial product platforms.

What you will do

• Own the architecture and delivery of scalable backend systems supporting acquisition, activation, conversion, retention, and expansion.
• Design high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems, including microservices, event-driven architectures, experimentation platforms, and data pipelines.
• Convert customer, product, lifecycle, behavioural, and intent signals into data products, decision systems, personalised journeys, and next-best actions.
• Build infrastructure for experimentation, feature flags, performance monitoring, and AI-native growth workflows.
• Partner with Product, Data Science, Frontend, Design, Marketing, and Engineering teams to deliver secure and measurable solutions.
• Lead initiatives from problem definition through production operation while raising standards for architecture, reliability, observability, and mentoring.

Requirements

• Significant experience designing, building, and operating production backend systems with ownership of reliability and continuous improvement.
• Strong knowledge of computer science fundamentals, object-oriented programming, distributed systems, domain-driven design, and event-driven architectures.
• Strong proficiency in Java, Kotlin, or a comparable backend language.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and containerised deployments, including AWS or GCP, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Experience with continuous integration, automated testing, code review, quality engineering, observability, and production operations.
• Track record of leading ambiguous cross-functional initiatives and delivering measurable outcomes.

Nice to have

• JVM development with Java or Kotlin and Spring or Spring Boot.
• Experience with experimentation platforms, feature flags, growth infrastructure, customer segmentation, or analytics products.
• Knowledge of data warehousing, event pipelines, lifecycle systems, and analytics tooling.
• Experience building products using AI or large language models.
• Experience in fintech, payments, or another regulated environment.

Culture & Benefits

• Autonomous ownership of roadmaps and technical decisions in an environment that values accountability and first-principles thinking.
• US-based employees receive medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan, disability and life insurance, and well-being benefits.
• US-based employees receive 20 paid vacation days and 12 paid company holidays annually.
• Additional compensation may include equity, annual bonuses, commissions, or RSUs.