Staff Software Engineer - Growth

Airwallex•San Francisco, CA

2d•$163,000 - $279,000•Hybrid

About The Position

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. You'll 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.

Requirements

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, and Engineering partners.

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

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.