Senior Backend Engineer
Airwallex
Senior Backend Engineer
Airwallex
Runs global payments and accounts for businesses
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.
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 Senior Backend Engineer, you'll design, build, and own the backend services and platform capabilities that power Growth at scale. You'll work on technically challenging problems at the intersection of distributed systems, AI, and data infrastructure, with direct visibility into business impact.
Build scalable backend systems, including high-performance APIs, distributed services, event-driven architectures, and real-time data processing capabilities that power growth automation and intelligent decision-making.
Develop AI-native capabilities that transform customer signals, product usage, lifecycle events, and business context into personalized experiences, next-best actions, and automated workflows.
Own end-to-end technical delivery, independently designing, implementing, deploying, and operating complex backend services and platform components.
Design for reliability and scale, building secure, observable, highly available services while continuously improving system performance and operational excellence.
Solve ambiguous business problems, partnering with Product, Data Science, Marketing, Sales, and other engineering teams to translate requirements into pragmatic technical solutions.
Elevate engineering quality through thoughtful system design, code reviews, knowledge sharing, and mentoring other engineers.
US: You'll work from our San Francisco office three days a week.
5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with substantial experience building and operating production backend systems, and a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
Strong proficiency in Python, Java, Kotlin, or a comparable backend language, with solid computer science fundamentals and experience with frameworks such as FastAPI or Spring Boot.
Strong understanding of distributed systems and backend architecture, including API design, data modeling, event-driven architectures, asynchronous processing, scalability, and reliability.
Proven ability to independently design and deliver complex backend solutions, making sound technical tradeoffs and owning services from implementation through production operations.
Strong ownership, problem-solving, and collaboration skills, with the ability to navigate ambiguity, work effectively across functions, and deliver high-quality solutions with minimal oversight.
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 have high agency. You proactively identify opportunities for improvement and take ownership of delivering solutions.
You're a strong builder. You enjoy turning ideas into production systems and take pride in shipping reliable, maintainable software.
You're pragmatic and outcome-oriented. You balance engineering quality with speed of execution and focus on delivering measurable impact.
You're comfortable with ambiguity. You break down complex problems, make thoughtful decisions with incomplete information, and adapt quickly.
You take end-to-end ownership. You care about how your systems perform in production, not just whether the code ships.
You communicate proactively. You surface risks early, collaborate effectively, and bring solutions rather than just problems.
You thrive in a global environment. You're comfortable working with distributed teams across APAC, EMEA, and the US.
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.
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. Please apply only through careers.airwallex.com or our official LinkedIn page.
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.
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.
Airwallex runs a financial platform for businesses that sell, buy and operate across borders, from startups to large enterprises. Its multi-currency accounts let customers receive and hold money locally, then pay overseas suppliers without converting every sale into their home currency. Businesses also use its corporate cards and expense controls to manage spending, while online sellers accept customer payments through its checkout tools. Finance teams work in a web app, and developers embed the services in other software; Airwallex earns transaction fees and charges for paid software plans. Founded in Melbourne in 2015, Airwallex has dual headquarters in Singapore and San Francisco.
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