Airwallex
What's the Work-Life Balance Like at Airwallex?
Frequently Asked Questions
Airwallex gives people real ownership over consequential work. It’s a global, high-pace environment, not a tightly bounded nine-to-five workplace. Early or late meetings can happen when teams span time zones, and busy periods can bring sharper deadlines or competing priorities.
For the right person, that’s the tradeoff: a steep learning curve, direct access to important decisions, and room to shape a company with substantial growth ahead. Workload depends on the role, team, manager, and location, so the hiring team should explain what the pace looks like in practice.
What you can expect
- Real ownership from the start, with room to make decisions and shape outcomes.
- Fast-moving work where progress matters more than waiting for a perfect playbook.
- Global collaboration with colleagues across regions and markets.
- A steep learning curve, high standards, and the chance to work on problems with meaningful scope.
- Direct exposure to a company that is still building new markets, products, and capabilities.
Always-on culture and permanent availability
Airwallex isn’t a low-intensity workplace, but that shouldn’t be confused with a blanket expectation of permanent availability. The culture puts more weight on ownership and outcomes than on being online every minute.
The day-to-day standard still varies by role, team, and time zone. A strong conversation with the hiring team should cover normal working hours, meeting patterns, focus time, and what happens when priorities compete.
Early or late meetings and global time zones
Global teams can mean some meetings outside a standard local workday. The frequency depends on the role and the locations involved. The practical question is how much live coordination the role requires and how the team uses async communication around it.
Time pressure and competing priorities
The work can be demanding when deadlines are sharp or priorities compete. That pace suits people who like turning ambiguity into action and moving important work forward. The hiring team should be able to explain how the team sets priorities, handles peak periods, and makes tradeoffs when capacity is tight.
Lean coverage, role stacking, and team capacity
Coverage and role scope differ across teams. Candidates should ask how the role is staffed, how responsibilities are shared during leave, and how priorities change when capacity changes. Those details give a more useful picture than a generic promise about work-life balance.
The honest tradeoff
Airwallex is a strong fit for people who want agency, pace, global scope, and the chance to shape outcomes rather than inherit a finished system. The work can be demanding, and the experience won’t be identical in every role. In return, people can build quickly, learn from high-calibre colleagues, and see their decisions matter.
Airwallex uses a region-specific work arrangement model rather than one global hybrid or remote-work percentage. The global policy sets required in-office days by location, with listed schedules ranging from three to five days per week and country-specific exemptions. In-person time is intended to support connection, learning, collaboration, and faster problem-solving.
The policy also sets out defined routes for flexibility:
- One-off short-term work from home, including up to three days in a month in regions with three-day in-office policies, subject to approval.
- Medium- or long-term flexible work arrangements reviewed through the People & Talent process.
- Permanent changes to in-office requirements, subject to the relevant approvals.
- Approved temporary remote work from another location for eligible employees, generally up to 30 calendar days per year under the Global Mobility Policy.
Employees can request mobility and flexibility accommodations through the Global Mobility & Flex Work request system. The process is designed to give people a clear way to discuss temporary or ongoing needs while taking account of role requirements, team needs, business continuity, and local requirements.
For candidates, the useful questions are specific:
- How many days is this role expected to be in the office?
- What short-term or ongoing flexibility is available in this location?
- How does the team work across time zones?
- What is the process for personal, health, or caregiving needs?
This model suits people who want autonomy in how they work while staying connected to colleagues and the wider company.
Airwallex supports employee mental health and wellbeing through four connected areas: confidential mental health care, meaningful time off, flexible work support, and regular employee listening. Benefits and eligibility are aligned to local requirements, so specific offerings vary by country.
Modern Health Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
Eligible employees can access Modern Health, Airwallex’s confidential mental health and wellbeing support platform:
- Six private coaching sessions per year.
- Six private therapy sessions per year.
- On-demand access.
- Full coverage and confidentiality.
- Additional resources that may include group support, guided meditation, self-paced tools, and support for eligible dependents, depending on location and eligibility.
The program gives employees practical support for stress, relationships, work, and other life challenges.
Paid time off and flexible work support
Airwallex supports work-life balance through paid leave, including birthday and volunteer days, and through flexible work pathways. Employees can request mobility and flexibility accommodations through the Global Mobility & Flex Work request system, subject to role requirements, business needs, approvals, and local policy.
Country-aligned benefits and employee listening
Airwallex’s Total Rewards framework includes competitive health benefits aligned by country, plus short- and long-term incentives. Regular Engagement Surveys inform updates to mental health, wellbeing, and employee-experience programs across regions.
Providers, coverage, eligibility, and leave entitlements vary by country. Candidates should ask which mental health, wellbeing, leave, and health benefits apply in their location.
External recognition for wellbeing and employee experience
Airwallex was named Best Employer of the Year at the 2025 Asia FinTech Awards. The judges cited Airwallex’s embedded learning and market-leading health and social initiatives. Airwallex was also named to three Built In 2026 Best Places to Work lists in the United States.
Airwallex is transparent that working here means operating in a fast-moving, ambitious environment where employees are trusted with meaningful ownership. The company also recognizes that long-term innovation depends on healthy, engaged employees, and continues investing in flexibility, wellbeing, community, and sustainable career growth.
This is a workplace for people who thrive on challenge while still valuing balance, connection, and personal wellbeing. It isn’t a fully remote or low-intensity company, and the experience varies by role, team, manager, location, and time zone.
Ownership, trust, and outcomes
Employees are encouraged to make decisions, solve difficult problems, and contribute beyond a narrow job description. Success is not framed around hours worked alone. The emphasis is on outcomes, collaboration, and long-term value creation, with autonomy over how people deliver results.
For top talent, the appeal is clear: meaningful scope, direct access to important decisions, rapid learning, and a visible connection between individual work and company progress. The tradeoff is less predictability and more ambiguity than a mature, tightly structured company.
Flexibility, wellbeing, and sustainable career growth
As Airwallex has expanded internationally, it has continued investing in health benefits, mental health resources, flexible and hybrid work, office communities, and employee engagement. Regional flexibility allows local teams to respond to employee needs while following a consistent global philosophy around wellbeing.
Specific arrangements and benefits vary by country, role, and eligibility. Candidates should confirm the role’s in-office cadence, remote-work options, normal working hours, cross-time-zone expectations, leave coverage, and available wellbeing support.
Community and connection
Work-life balance at Airwallex is not limited to formal benefits. Office lunches, social events, learning days, volunteer opportunities, and cross-office collaboration help employees build relationships and stay connected across a global workforce.
What candidates can expect during hiring
Airwallex aims to give candidates a realistic view of team expectations, flexibility, benefits, and ways of working. Candidates should use the hiring process to assess whether the company’s pace, culture, and work-life balance approach fit their goals and preferred working style.
External signals
- Comparably: employee feedback highlights Airwallex’s flexible work environment and collaborative culture.
- Glassdoor: employee reviews commonly describe meaningful work, supportive colleagues, and opportunities to maintain balance in a high-growth environment.
- Built In: Airwallex’s workplace profile highlights its hybrid work model, employee benefits, and office experience.
- Asia FinTech Awards 2025: Airwallex was named Best Employer of the Year, with judges citing embedded learning and market-leading health and social initiatives.
- Built In 2026: Airwallex was named to three Best Places to Work lists in the United States.
Bottom line
Airwallex combines the pace of a scaling global fintech with a growing investment in employee wellbeing, flexibility, and community. People who enjoy ownership, rapid learning, and meaningful work can find an environment that supports ambitious career growth alongside sustainable long-term success.
Airwallex's Candidate Tradeoffs
If you’re weighing whether Airwallex is the right fit, these are the core tradeoffs to consider.
- Airwallex places greater emphasis on organization-wide flexibility and autonomy than on tightly standardized schedules and uniform work structures.
Airwallex Employee Perspectives
As I reflect on the trajectory that Airwallex has had, it’s clear to me that we wouldn’t be where we are without our people. In the last nine years, growing as a CEO alongside Airwallex has been a journey for me, and I hope all who join our team have a similarly meaningful experience of personal and professional growth.
Nothing is more important to me than our people. I want Airwallex to be a company where people are inspired to do the most impactful work of their careers and to have fun and be rewarded for doing it. We have had some missteps in this area in the past, as many start-ups do.
Looking forward, I want to double down on our commitment to empower our employees and highlight some of the mistakes we made in the hope it will help other startups to do things differently.
In our early years, we often hired on experience alone, but over time we learned that intellectual curiosity and merit were far stronger indicators of success in a company that is rapidly innovating. We also under-invested in our people and talent team – a strategic error that took us several years to rectify as we sought to build a dynamic culture and nurturing employee experience. This hurt us as we didn’t respond quickly enough to employee pain points while building our business at a rapid pace.
In the past two years, our company has matured in many ways. We’ve invested heavily in our people and talent team to help build a positive and thriving culture for our 1600+ employees. I’ve been consistently impressed by the ambitious talent we have hired and their ability to digest complex problems and propose creative solutions that vastly improve legacy approaches.
The company’s most recent H1 2024 employee survey saw 85 percent engagement and 92 percent sense of purpose scores – our highest yet, with a 92 percent participation rate across the company. It’s a promising sign of our actions to date. This has included reinvigorating our team-building events and redesigning our local and global town halls to provide regular updates on our business to help employees understand how their work relates to our business strategy. We have introduced more fireside chats and “ask me anything” sessions with myself and other global leaders to encourage transparency and connectedness, and these actions continue to evolve along with our culture.
Our score on performance management is also on the uptick at 89 percent – a positive sign of how manager training launched earlier this year is helping our people leaders engage more effectively with their teams. Growth and development scores are holding steady at 80 percent as we continue to build a more structured approach to mid-year and annual reviews to focus on immediate feedback and long-term career development for employees.
The below chart tracks our employee engagement score globally over the past 18 months.
We also remain focused on the wellbeing of our employees. Non-negotiables for us include healthcare, mental wellness, and volunteer leave. In addition, every employee has equity in the business as we believe in rewarding everyone for what we’re collectively building. As we’re growing rapidly and geographically distributed among 23 offices globally (including Australia and Singapore), we’ve also established operating principles that define who we are and how we work together towards our goals.
As we seek to hire an additional 400 employees over the coming months, we are looking for people who add to our culture, and not just fit in. We must be better every day so we can continue to deliver on our mission to help businesses thrive. And I’m very much aware that we can’t do that without our number one asset – our people.
When I read some of our employees’ stories about how Airwallex has allowed them to pivot their careers, I see how our culture has grown roots. The sense of optimism, curiosity, determination and resilience in our people is clear and it’s these two quotes in particular that resonate with me:
This is a reflection of the company we are building and as we scale, our culture will continue to build one person at a time, one win at a time. We are building the global economic infrastructure that will empower businesses of all sizes to grow beyond borders.
As employees build their careers at Airwallex, we press ahead with technology at our core, building infrastructure and applications to empower businesses to operate anywhere, anytime, allowing entrepreneurs, business builders, makers and creators to access opportunities in every corner of the world.
The opportunity to build a durable impact on the global economy by being part of team Airwallex is immense. I hope the investments we are making in people and culture allow employees to do some of the most rewarding and impactful work of their lives.
Airwallex Employee Reviews
What People Are Saying About Airwallex
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Remote or Hybrid Flexibility: Hybrid, hub-based roles and job postings highlight flexible arrangements and autonomy that help manage personal time. A current U.S. engineering listing explicitly cites a flexible work environment that respects work-life balance.
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Time Off Access: U.S. postings highlight generous paid vacation days and company holidays, with additional options like volunteer and birthday leave in some markets. These provisions create structured opportunities to disconnect and recharge.
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Mental Health Support: Benefits materials note access to Modern Health and other wellbeing resources designed to support employees’ mental health. Such programs complement flexibility and PTO to help sustain balance through busy periods.
Airwallex's Benefits
Allows employees to take a day off for their birthday
Offers generous PTO
Generous leave offerings including birthday & volunteer leave
Offers paid volunteer time
3 days annually https://www.airwallex.com/newsroom/airwallex-impact-program
Offers unpaid extended leave
Procedures in place to ensure employees utilize PTO
Airwallex encourages employees to take their paid time off and supports this through clear request, approval, coverage, and disconnect practices. Specific leave procedures may vary by country and team
Provides bereavement leave
Provides paid holidays
Provides paid sick days
Provides sick leave
Airwallex provides paid sick leave, with entitlements and processes tailored to local requirements and employee location. Specific provisions may vary by country or entity.
Flexibility provided during personal challenges
Has employee-led culture committees
Offers an Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
Offers company-sponsored happy hours
Offers company-sponsored outings
Offers team workouts
Running clubs, football teams
Offers wellness initiatives designed to combat burnout and mental fatigue
Offers wellness programs
USA: Modern Health: Supporting well-being & performance and EAP
Partners with nonprofits
By partnering with Pledge 1% to set aside 1 percent of Airwallex stock, currently valued at US$56M, the company has built a sustainable, durable model for ongoing corporate philanthropy.
Provides employees with ability to schedule focus-time blocks
Airwallex encourages employees to use calendar blocks and notification settings such as Do Not Disturb to protect focus time. How this works may vary by team, role, and location.
Provides opportunities to volunteer in the local community
Beginning in 2025, all 1,700+ Airwallex employees will commit three days per year to volunteering – amounting to roughly 1 percent of employee time devoted to community service.
Provides recreational clubs
Airwallex run club, football and basketball teams
Works with employees to create a sustainable work pace
Allows work from home occasionally
Established expectations for communication between time zones
In-office days / expectations are defined
Provides work from home flexibility
Utilizes a flexible work schedule
Utilizes a hybrid work model
