Staff AI Engineer

Airwallex • San Francisco, CA

11h

About The Position

About Airwallex Airwallex is the only unified payments and financial platform for global businesses. Powered by our unique combination of proprietary infrastructure and software, we empower over 200,000 businesses worldwide – including Brex, Rippling, Navan, Qantas, SHEIN and many more – with fully integrated solutions to manage everything from business accounts, payments, spend management and treasury, to embedded finance at a global scale. Proudly founded in Melbourne, we have a team of over 2,000 of the brightest and most innovative people in tech across 26 offices around the globe. Valued at US$8 billion and backed by world-leading investors including T. Rowe Price, Visa, Mastercard, Robinhood Ventures, Sequoia, Salesforce Ventures, DST Global, and Lone Pine Capital, Airwallex is leading the charge in building the global payments and financial platform of the future. If you’re ready to do the most ambitious work of your career, join us. Attributes We Value We hire successful builders with founder-like energy who want real impact, accelerated learning, and true ownership. You bring strong role-related expertise and sharp thinking, and you’re motivated by our mission and operating principles . You move fast with good judgment, dig deep with curiosity, and make decisions from first principles, balancing speed and rigor. You're humble and collaborative; turn zero‑to‑one ideas into real products, and you “get stuff done” end-to-end. You use AI to work smarter and solve problems faster. Here, you’ll tackle complex, high‑visibility problems with exceptional teammates and grow your career as we build the future of global banking. If that sounds like you, let’s build what’s next. About the Team This team is building production AI that eliminates financial busywork for startups globally. We're delivering intelligent automation across payments, payroll, bookkeeping, and tax—freeing founders to focus on building their companies instead of managing finances. We leverage cutting-edge AI tooling across the spectrum: from prompt engineering and in-context learning to fine-tuned models and agentic systems, choosing the right approach for each problem. We work backward from real founder pain points, own customer outcomes, and ship fast. The team is small, elite, and builder-focused, led by operators with a track record of shipping AI products at scale. You'll solve hard technical problems with real autonomy and direct customer impact. About the Role You’ll be the technical leader for AI on our team, setting strategy, architecture, and standards for agentic systems that automate complex, multi-step workflows. You will turn one-off wins into reusable patterns and platforms, moving ideas from whiteboard to reliable, scalable production.

Requirements

• 8+ years in applied AI/ML with production deployments and cross-team impact.
• Strong Python; experience with ML frameworks (PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow).
• Track record building and deploying AI agents, orchestration frameworks, or multi-step reasoning systems.
• Proven ability to set direction, create standards, mentor, and balance innovation with production needs.

Responsibilities

• Define shared architectures and reusable patterns for reasoning, tool use, and workflow automation.
• Build and evolve shared agent platforms using frameworks like LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, CrewAI, and emerging OSS stacks.
• Guide pragmatic model choices across prompting, RAG, fine-tuning, or training from scratch.
• Establish standards for monitoring, evaluation, iteration, and integration into secure production systems while balancing reliability, scalability, and compliance.
• Drive high-impact initiatives end-to-end; mentor engineers and lead design reviews.
• Build systems that improve with usage and apply learnings across use cases.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees