Staff Software Engineer, Growth (AI)

Location: Seattle; US-based employees work from the San Francisco office three days a week.

Salary: Base salary $163K–$279K annually, plus possible equity and bonus.

Company

Airwallex is an AI-native financial operating system and regulated global payments infrastructure company serving businesses and financial product partners.

What you will do

• Define technical strategy and architecture for Growth Engineering platforms and lead complex initiatives from design through production.
• Build scalable backend infrastructure, including high-performance APIs, distributed services, event-driven architectures, and real-time data processing systems.
• Develop AI-native capabilities that use customer signals, product usage, lifecycle events, and business context to create personalized experiences, next-best actions, and automated workflows.
• Design for performance, fault tolerance, observability, security, reliability, and operational excellence.
• Translate ambiguous business challenges into technical solutions while partnering with Product, Data Science, Marketing, Sales, and Engineering.
• Raise engineering standards through architectural leadership, design reviews, mentoring, and hands-on work on complex problems.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, substantial backend development experience, and a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Strong proficiency in Python, Java, Kotlin, or a comparable backend language, with computer science fundamentals, object-oriented design skills, and experience with FastAPI or Spring Boot.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems and backend architecture, including domain-driven design, event-driven architectures, scalability, reliability, and modern engineering practices.
• Proven Staff-level technical leadership driving complex cross-team initiatives, shaping architectural decisions, and mentoring engineers.
• Strong ownership and execution skills, including navigating ambiguity, making pragmatic technical tradeoffs, and delivering solutions from design through production operations.

Nice to have

• Experience with growth platforms, experimentation systems, customer segmentation engines, marketing automation, or data-intensive applications.
• Experience building AI-powered applications or agentic workflows, including LLM integration, tool orchestration, evaluation, and production observability.
• Experience with real-time data pipelines, streaming technologies, or large-scale event processing.
• Familiarity with AWS or GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud infrastructure.
• Experience with Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, or equivalent observability and reliability tooling.
• Experience designing integrations across product, analytics, CRM, marketing, or other enterprise systems.
• Experience in high-growth technology companies, fintech, payments, or regulated environments.

Culture & Benefits

• Work in a global environment with distributed teams across APAC, EMEA, and the US.
• Operate with high agency, systems thinking, pragmatism, and outcome orientation.
• Lead through influence, communicate clearly, mentor engineers, and collaborate across teams.
• US-based employees may receive medical, dental, vision, 401(k), disability, life insurance, and well-being benefits.
• US-based employees receive 20 paid vacation days and 12 paid company holidays annually.