Staff Backend Engineer, Agentic AI

Airwallex is the only unified payments and financial platform for global businesses. Powered by proprietary infrastructure and software, we empower over 250,000 businesses worldwide with fully integrated solutions to manage business accounts, payments, spend management, treasury, and embedded finance at a global scale. Founded in Melbourne, we have a team of over 2,300 innovators across 27 offices globally, backed by leading investors and valued at US$11 billion.

Attributes We Value

• Founder-like energy with a drive for real impact, accelerated learning, and ownership
• Strong role-related expertise and sharp thinking, motivated by mission and operating principles
• Ability to move fast with good judgment, dig deep with curiosity, and make decisions from first principles
• Humble, collaborative, and results-driven—turning ideas into real products end-to-end
• Use of AI to work smarter and solve problems faster
• Willingness to tackle complex, high-visibility problems with exceptional teammates

About The Team

This team designs intelligent, autonomous systems that eliminate financial operations for companies globally. We automate bookkeeping, reconciliation, tax, payroll, forecasting, and document understanding—turning hours of work into seconds. The team blends deep research pedigree with proven industry experience, operating with high standards and tool-agnostic flexibility. Engineers own problems end-to-end, collaborate closely, and ship exceptional work quickly while solving unprecedented technical challenges using unique financial datasets.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate distributed, event-driven systems that process high-volume, high-sensitivity financial data with strict correctness and latency guarantees
• Build typed, production-grade APIs and services in Python (FastAPI + Pydantic) that power agentic workflows, AI copilots, and real-time financial infrastructure
• Own data architecture end-to-end: schema design, event models, ledger primitives, and storage layers optimized for auditability, traceability, and scale
• Develop resilient infrastructure primitives (queues, retries, idempotency, observability, backpressure handling) to enable fast, reliable shipping
• Work at the intersection of systems + AI, building feedback loops where product data improves models and models autonomously improve system behavior
• Ship platform foundations—internal frameworks, SDKs, and tooling—that accelerate every engineer in the org
• Partner closely with ML and product teams to productionize research-grade ideas into customer-facing systems
• Help define the architecture of an AI-native financial stack, designing software where AI is a first-class runtime

Requirements

• 8+ years of backend experience with Python at scale
• Deep knowledge of SQL/NoSQL database design
• Experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, or microservices
• Familiarity with GCP services (Pub/Sub, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, BigQuery, KMS, etc.)
• Strong grasp of security and compliance best practices
• Passion for building the backend that powers intelligent products

Pay

Compensation range: $182,000 - $310,000