Senior Backend Engineer (Agentic AI)

Location: San Francisco, United States; hybrid work with three days per week in the San Francisco office

Salary: $150,000–$245,000 base salary per year, plus potential equity and bonus

Company

Airwallex is an AI-native financial operating system and regulated global payments infrastructure company serving more than 675,000 businesses across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.

What you will do

• Design and build scalable backend services, typed APIs, and production-grade infrastructure in Python using FastAPI and Pydantic.
• Develop infrastructure primitives for queues, retries, idempotency, observability, and backpressure handling.
• Build feedback loops that connect product data, AI models, and system behaviour.
• Create internal frameworks, SDKs, and developer tooling that accelerate engineering teams.
• Partner with ML and product teams to productionise research-grade ideas into customer-facing systems.
• Help define the architecture of an AI-native financial stack with AI as a first-class runtime.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of backend engineering experience with Python at scale.
• Deep knowledge of SQL and NoSQL database design.
• Experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, or microservices.
• Familiarity with GCP services including Pub/Sub, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, BigQuery, and KMS.
• Strong understanding of security and compliance best practices.
• Experience designing and operating reliable, production-grade services.

Nice to have

• Experience building agentic workflows, AI copilots, or AI-native products.
• Experience with financial systems, ledgers, payments, accounting, or other high-integrity domains.
• Experience building internal platforms, frameworks, SDKs, or developer tooling.
• Experience partnering with ML and product teams to productionise research or prototypes.

Culture & Benefits

• Work in a small, builder-focused team within a scaled company.
• Own roadmap decisions and outcomes with a high degree of autonomy.
• US-based employees may 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.