Staff Backend Engineer, Agentic AI

About the role

Airwallex is building T:0, an AI-native accounting platform that helps businesses close the books, reconcile and report continuously. As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will design the systems that make intelligent financial workflows reliable, auditable and scalable. You will work from the San Francisco office three days a week.

Key responsibilities

• 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 using FastAPI and Pydantic to power agentic workflows, AI copilots and real-time financial infrastructure.
• Own data architecture end to end, including schema design, event models, ledger primitives and storage layers optimized for auditability, traceability and scale.
• Develop resilient infrastructure primitives such as queues, retries, idempotency, observability and backpressure handling.
• Build feedback loops between systems and AI, where product data continuously improves models and models improve system behavior.
• Ship platform foundations such as internal frameworks, SDKs and tooling, and partner with ML and product teams to productionize research-grade ideas.
• Define the architecture of an AI-native financial stack, treating AI as a first-class runtime.

Required profile

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience, including substantial experience with Python at scale.
• Deep knowledge of SQL and NoSQL database design.
• Experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures or microservices.
• Strong understanding of security and compliance best practices.
• Track record of owning complex technical problems end to end, and a strong interest in backend systems for intelligent products.
• Comfortable owning the roadmap, working with ambiguity and holding yourself to a high standard.

Preferred

• Experience building agentic workflows, AI copilots or AI-native products.
• Experience with financial systems, ledgers, payments, accounting or other high-integrity domains.
• Experience building internal platforms, frameworks, SDKs or developer tooling.
• Experience partnering with ML and product teams to productionize research or prototypes.