Staff Software Engineer, Growth

Airwallex • Seattle, WA

5d • $163,000 - $279,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Growth Engineering at Airwallex is building an AI-native platform to support customer acquisition, activation, conversion, retention, and expansion. The platform combines scalable infrastructure, intelligent decision systems, and automation across product, sales, and marketing to drive measurable business outcomes.

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will define technical architecture and build foundational systems for Growth at scale. The role includes leading complex initiatives from design through production, building high-performance APIs and distributed, event-driven services, and developing AI-native capabilities that turn customer and business signals into personalized experiences, recommended actions, and automated workflows. You will establish foundations for reliability, performance, fault tolerance, observability, security, and operational excellence. You will also collaborate across Product, Data Science, Marketing, Sales, and Engineering, and contribute through architectural leadership, mentorship, design reviews, and hands-on engineering.

The US role works from the San Francisco office three days a week.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of professional software engineering experience, including substantial backend development experience.
• A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Strong proficiency in Python, Java, Kotlin, or a comparable backend language; solid computer science fundamentals and 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.
• Staff-level technical leadership, including a track record of driving complex cross-team initiatives, shaping architectural decisions, and mentoring engineers.
• Strong ownership and execution skills, including navigating ambiguity, making pragmatic technical tradeoffs, and delivering high-quality solutions from design through production operations.

Nice To Haves

• 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 AWS or GCP, containerization, and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience with production observability and reliability tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, or equivalents.
• Experience designing integrations across product, analytics, CRM, marketing, or other enterprise systems.
• Experience in high-growth technology companies, fintech, payments, or regulated environments.

Responsibilities

• Drive technical strategy and architecture for critical Growth Engineering platforms, influencing decisions across 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.
• Develop AI-native platform capabilities that turn customer signals, product usage, lifecycle events, and business context into personalized experiences, next-best actions, and automated workflows.
• Establish strong foundations for performance, fault tolerance, observability, security, reliability, and operational excellence.
• Translate ambiguous business challenges into technical solutions in partnership with Product, Data Science, Marketing, Sales, and engineering teams.
• Provide architectural leadership, technical mentorship, thoughtful design reviews, and hands-on contributions to complex engineering problems.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior