Senior Backend Engineer (Agentic AI)

TL;DR

Senior Backend Engineer (Python/AI): Building the backbone of intelligent finance systems to automate global financial operations with an accent on scalable services, resilient APIs, and data models. Focus on designing distributed event-driven systems and productionizing AI-native financial stacks.

Location: Based in San Francisco

Company

Airwallex is a unified payments and financial platform for global businesses, empowering over 200,000 companies worldwide with integrated financial solutions.

What you will do

• Design and operate distributed, event-driven systems that process high-volume, high-sensitivity financial data.
• Build production-grade APIs and services using Python, FastAPI, and Pydantic to power agentic workflows and AI copilots.
• Own end-to-end data architecture, including schema design, event models, and ledger primitives.
• Develop resilient infrastructure primitives such as queues, retries, idempotency, and observability.
• Partner with ML and product teams to productionize research-grade ideas into customer-facing systems.
• Define the architecture of an AI-native financial stack where AI is treated as a first-class runtime.

Requirements

• 5+ years of backend experience with Python at scale.
• Must be based in San Francisco.
• Deep knowledge of SQL/NoSQL database design.
• Experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, or microservices.
• Familiarity with GCP services such as Pub/Sub, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, and BigQuery.
• Strong grasp of security and compliance best practices.

Culture & Benefits

• Opportunity to solve unprecedented technical challenges using unique financial datasets.
• Environment that values founder-like energy, true ownership, and accelerated learning.
• Collaborative culture that blends deep research pedigree with proven industry experience.
• Focus on building platform foundations and internal frameworks rather than one-off features.