Staff AI Engineer

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 150,000 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 1,800 of the brightest and most innovative people in tech across 26 offices around the globe. Valued at US$6.2 billion and backed by world-leading investors including Visa, Airtree, Blackbird, Sequoia, DST Global, Greenoaks, Salesforce Ventures, Lone Pine, and Square Peg, 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.

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.

What You’ll Do

• 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 You Need to Have

• 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.

Airwallex is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and anyone seeking employment at Airwallex is considered based on merit, qualifications, competence and talent. We don’t regard color, religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, ancestry, citizenship, sex, marital or family status, disability, gender, or any other legally protected status when making our hiring decisions. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.

Airwallex does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firms/recruiters.  Airwallex will not pay any fees to search firms/recruiters if a candidate is submitted by a search firm/recruiter unless an agreement has been entered into with respect to specific open position(s).  Search firms/recruiters submitting resumes to Airwallex on an unsolicited basis shall be deemed to accept this condition, regardless of any other provision to the contrary. If you are approached by someone claiming to represent Airwallex, please verify with our team.