Staff Backend Engineer, Agentic AI

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 250,000 businesses worldwide – including Brex, 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 2,300 of the brightest and most innovative people in tech across 27 offices around the globe. Valued at US$11 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 r [... source excerpt omitted ...] nd thoughtful data models. Our backend is primarily Python on GCP, and your work will ensure we can move quickly while maintaining enterprise-grade reliability and security. What You'll Do Design and operate distributed, event-driven systems that process high-volume, high-sensitivity financial data with strict correctness and latency guarantees. Build typed, production-grade APIs and services in Python (FastAPI + Pydantic) that power agentic workflows, AI copilots, and real-time financial infrastructure. Own data architecture end-to-end schema design, event models, ledger primitives, and storage layers optimized for auditability, traceability, and scale. Develop resilient [... source excerpt omitted ...] ior. Ship platform foundations, not one-off features internal frameworks, SDKs, and tooling that accelerate every engineer in the org. Partner closely with ML + product teams to productionize research-grade ideas into real customer-facing systems. Help define the architecture of an AI-native financial stack not bolting AI onto software, but designing software assuming AI is a first-class runtime. This role is based in San Francisco. What You’ll Need to have 8+ years backend experience with Python at scale. Deep knowledge of SQL/NoSQL database design. Experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, or microservices. Familiarity with GCP services (Pub/Sub, C