Staff Software Engineer, Growth

Airwallex; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Airwallex, an AI-native growth platform, is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer in San Francisco to shape the architecture of growth systems and build scalable backends and AI-enabled workflows.

You will collaborate with Product, Data Science, Marketing, and Sales to turn customer signals into automated journeys and measurable value. This role requires 8+ years of experience, distributed-systems mastery, and strong technical leadership.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Backend language proficiency: Python, Java, or Kotlin.
• Experience with distributed systems and architecture.
• Staff-level technical leadership and cross-team mentoring.
• Strong ownership, pragmatic tradeoffs, delivering from design to production.

Responsibilities

• Drive technical strategy and architecture for Growth platforms, influencing engineering decisions across teams.
• Build scalable backend infrastructure, including APIs, distributed services, and real-time data processing.
• Develop AI-native platform capabilities transforming signals into personalized experiences and automation.
• Design for reliability, observability, security, and operational excellence.
• Translate ambiguous business challenges into technical solutions with Product, Data Science, Marketing, Sales, and engineering teams.
• Elevate engineering excellence through architectural leadership, design reviews, and mentorship.

Skills

Backend engineering

Python/Java/Kotlin

Distributed systems

Staff-level leadership

Ownership & execution

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering

Tools

FastAPI

Spring Boot

AWS

GCP

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

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 2,300 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.
• Experience with real-time data pipelines, streaming technologies, or large‑scale event processing.
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure such as AWS or GCP, containerization, and orchestration technologies including Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience with production observability and reliability tooling such as Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, or equivalent.
• Experience designing integrations across product, analytics, CRM, marketing, or other enterprise systems.
• Experience in high-growth technology companies, fintech, payments, or regulated environments.

You’ll thrive here if

• You have high agency. You proactively identify high-impact opportunities, shape technical direction, and drive execution without waiting for detailed instructions.
• You think in systems. You build reusable platforms and abstractions that enable multiple teams to move faster rather than optimizing for one‑off solutions.
• You're pragmatic and outcome-oriented. You balance long‑term architectural quality with speed of delivery, and measure success by real‑world impact.
• You're comfortable with ambiguity. You make thoughtful decisions with incomplete information, validate assumptions quickly, and adapt as you learn.
• You lead through influence. You communicate clearly, challenge ideas constructively, mentor other engineers, and build alignment across teams.
• You balance autonomy with collaboration. You know when to make decisions independently and when broader alignment is essential.
• You thrive in a global environment. You're comfortable collaborating across distributed teams and time zones, including APAC, EMEA, and the US.

Learn more about your team

Growth at Airwallex is building a unified, AI-native growth system across product, sales, and marketing. Rather than applying AI to isolated tasks, we use customer context, machine learning, automation, and continuous learning to transform how Airwallex acquires, activates, converts, retains, and expands customers.

You’ll build high‑traffic platforms, experimentation frameworks, and intelligent decision systems that turn signals—such as company profile, product usage, lifecycle stage, behavior, and intent—into personalized journeys, next‑best actions, and measurable incremental value.

The work spans both human + AI and autonomous operating models: AI-native tools that increase the leverage of growth teams, alongside agentic workflows that can research opportunities, launch and optimize campaigns, orchestrate customer journeys, and measure outcomes within clear strategies and guardrails.

The challenge is to combine consumer‑technology speed with the precision, trust, and regulatory complexity of global B2B finance. If you enjoy owning ambiguous problems end to end, prototyping quickly, measuring real business impact, and using every outcome to improve the next decision, you’ll help define how an AI-native global financial platform grows.

Applicant Safety Policy: Fraud and Third-Party Recruiters

To protect you from recruitment scams, please be aware that Airwallex will not ask for bank details, sensitive ID numbers (i.e. passport), or any form of payment during the application or interview process. All official communication will come from an @airwallex.com email address.

Airwallex does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firms/recruiters. Airwallex will not pay any fees to search firms/recruiters if a candidate is submitted by a search firm/recruiter unless an agreement has been entered into with respect to specific open position(s). Search firms/recruiters submitting resumes to Airwallex on an unsolicited basis shall be deemed to accept this condition, regardless of any other provision to the contrary.

Equal opportunity

Airwallex is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and anyone seeking employment at Airwallex is considered based on merit, qualifications, competence and talent. We don’t regard color, religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, ancestry, citizenship, sex, marital or family status, disability, gender, or any other legally protected status when making our hiring decisions. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.