Staff Backend Engineer (Agentic AI)

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

Salary: $182,000–$310,000 annual base pay, plus potential equity and bonus

Company

Airwallex provides an AI-native financial operating system and infrastructure for global payments, financial operations, and financial products.

What you will do

• Design and operate distributed, event-driven systems processing high-volume, sensitive financial data with strict correctness and latency requirements.
• Build typed production APIs and services in Python using FastAPI and Pydantic for agentic workflows, AI copilots, and real-time financial infrastructure.
• Own data architecture, including schemas, event models, ledger primitives, and auditable storage layers.
• Develop reliability primitives such as queues, retries, idempotency, observability, and backpressure handling.
• Build internal frameworks, SDKs, tooling, and feedback loops connecting product data, AI models, and system behavior.
• Partner with ML and product teams to productionize research-grade ideas and define an AI-native financial stack.

Requirements

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience, including substantial Python experience at scale.
• Deep knowledge of SQL and NoSQL database design, distributed systems, event-driven architectures, or microservices.
• Experience with GCP services including Pub/Sub, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, BigQuery, and KMS.
• Strong understanding of security, compliance, and reliable production-grade backend systems.
• Track record of owning complex technical problems end to end and interest in intelligent products.
• Ability to work from the San Francisco office three days per week.

Nice to have

• Experience with 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 productionize research or prototypes.

Culture & Benefits

• Work in a small, builder-focused team within a scaled financial infrastructure company.
• Direct ownership of outcomes, roadmap, and complex technical problems.
• US-based employees may receive medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k), disability and life insurance, and well-being benefits.
• US-based employees receive 20 paid vacation days and 12 paid company holidays per calendar year.
• The role may include equity and bonus compensation in addition to base pay.