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Airwallex is an AI-native financial operating system serving over 675,000 businesses globally, including McLaren Racing, Qantas, SHEIN, and TikTok. The company provides regulated financial infrastructure spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, with 2,300+ employees across 27 offices.
The Growth Engineering team is building an AI-native platform that powers customer acquisition, activation, conversion, retention, and expansion. As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will define technical architecture and build foundational systems that power growth at scale.
Key responsibilities include:
- 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
The role is based in Seattle with an expectation to work from the San Francisco office three days per week (hybrid arrangement).
REQUIREMENTS:
Essentials:
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with substantial backend development experience and a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field
- Strong proficiency in Python, Java, Kotlin, or 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 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
