Staff Software Engineer, Growth

About Airwallex

Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. More than 675,000 businesses, including McLaren Racing, Qantas, SHEIN, and TikTok, use us, directly or through our platform partners, to run their financial operations or build and monetize financial products of their own.

We started in Melbourne in 2015 to build the infrastructure global commerce runs on. We're the regulated backbone behind global payments: not by accident, but by design. A decade plus, 85+ licenses, and a financial infrastructure spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.

We're co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, with more than 2,700 people across 27 offices. We hire builders with founder-level energy, people who move fast with good judgment, dig in with real curiosity, and make calls from first principles rather than waiting to be told what to do. Read our operating principles to see it in full.

How you'll make impact

Growth Engineering at Airwallex is building an AI-native platform that powers customer acquisition, activation, conversion, retention, and expansion. We're developing scalable infrastructure, intelligent decision systems, and automation capabilities that connect product, sales, and marketing to drive measurable business outcomes.

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you'll play a critical role in defining the technical architecture and building the foundational systems that power Growth at scale.

Drive technical strategy and architecture for critical Growth Engineering platforms, influencing engineering decisions across multiple teams and leading 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 that power growth automation and intelligent decision-making.

Develop AI-native platform capabilities that transform customer signals, product usage, lifecycle events, and business context into personalized experiences, next-best actions, and automated workflows.

Design for reliability and scale , establishing strong foundations for performance, fault tolerance, observability, security, and operational excellence.

Translate ambiguous business challenges into technical solutions , partnering with Product, Data Science, Marketing, Sales, and engineering teams to deliver measurable outcomes.

Elevate engineering excellence through architectural leadership, technical mentorship, thoughtful design reviews, and hands-on contributions to complex engineering problems.

US: You'll work from our San Francisco office three days a week.

What we're looking for

Essentials

8+ years of professional software engineering experience , with substantial experience in backend development 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 solid computer science fundamentals, object-oriented design skills, and experience with frameworks such as 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 , with a track record of driving complex, cross-team engineering initiatives, shaping architectural decisions, and mentoring other engineers.

Strong ownership and execution skills , with the ability to navigate ambiguity, make pragmatic technical tradeoffs, and deliver high-quality solutions from design through production operations.

Preferred

Experience building 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.