Staff Software Engineer - Growth

Airwallex; United States; Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Airwallex is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer in Seattle to own core backend systems driving growth across acquisition, activation, conversion, retention, and expansion.

You will design scalable architectures, partner with Product, Data Science, Frontend, Design, and Marketing to translate complex problems into reliable technical solutions while maintaining data privacy and regulatory compliance.

Qualifications

• Significant experience designing, building, and operating production backend systems with ownership from design to reliability.
• Strong fundamentals in CS, OO design, distributed systems, and event-driven architectures.
• Proficiency in high-throughput, low-latency services with scalable architectures.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (GCP/AWS) and containerized deployments.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture and delivery of scalable backend systems powering growth initiatives.
• Design and evolve high-throughput, low-latency distributed services.
• Turn signals into reliable data products and intelligent flows.
• Collaborate with product, data science, frontend, design, and marketing to solve business problems.

Skills

Backend systems design

Distributed systems

Java/Kotlin

Cloud infrastructure

Observability

Cross-functional collaboration

Docker

Kubernetes

Spring/Spring Boot

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Grafana

Prometheus

Splunk

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

Airwallex is building a unified, AI-native growth system across product, sales, and marketing. You’ll **own** the backend foundations that turn customer and product signals into measurable growth across acquisition, activation, conversion, retention, and expansion.

Own the architecture and delivery of scalable backend systems that power Airwallex's growth initiatives across acquisition, activation, conversion, retention, and expansion.

Design and evolve high-throughput, low-latency, highly available distributed systems, including microservices, event-driven architectures, experimentation platforms, and data pipelines.

Turn customer, product, lifecycle, behavioural, and intent signals into reliable data products, intelligent decision systems, personalised journeys, and next-best actions.

Partner closely with Product, Data Science, Frontend, Design, Marketing, and other Engineering teams to translate ambiguous business problems into secure, measurable technical solutions.

Raise the technical bar through architectural reviews, code reviews, mentoring, observability, resilient service design, and pragmatic engineering standards.

Build the foundations for rapid experimentation, feature flags, performance monitoring, and AI-native growth workflows while protecting customer data and meeting regulatory expectations.

Drive complex initiatives from problem definition through production operation, making sound technical decisions with a high degree of autonomy.

You’ll work from our Seattle office three days a week.

What we're looking for

Essentials

• Significant experience designing, building, and operating production backend systems, with strong ownership from technical design through reliability and ongoing improvement.
• Deep understanding of computer science fundamentals, object-oriented programming, distributed systems, domain-driven design, and event-driven architectures.
• Strong experience with high-throughput, low-latency, highly available services and systems.
• Strong proficiency in Java, Kotlin, or a comparable backend language, with the ability to make sound choices across service design and implementation.
• Experience with modern engineering practices, including continuous integration, automated testing, code review, and quality engineering.
• Experience working with cloud infrastructure and containerised deployments, such as GCP or AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Experience with observability and production operations, including tools such as Splunk, Grafana, or Prometheus.
• A track record of leading ambiguous, cross-functional technical initiatives and delivering measurable outcomes.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively with Product, Data Science, Design, Marketing partners.

Preferred

• Experience with JVM-based development using Java or Kotlin and frameworks such as Spring or Spring Boot.
• Experience building experimentation platforms, feature-flag systems, growth infrastructure, customer segmentation, or analytics products.
• Experience solving go-to-market or growth operations problems end to end.
• Knowledge of data warehousing, event pipelines, lifecycle systems, and analytics tooling.
• Experience building internal or customer-facing products that use AI or large language models.
• Experience in fintech, payments, or another regulated environment.

You’ll thrive here if

• You’re comfortable owning the roadmap yourself.
• You’re comfortable making decisions with incomplete information and moving quickly anyway.
• You hold yourself to a high standard even when no one is watching. Quality and accountability aren't external expectations, they're internal ones.
• You know when to align and when to just decide. Collaboration isn't a way to avoid accountability.
• You come to the table with a point of view, not just a problem.

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 isolat