Staff Frontend Engineer, AI

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 1,700 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.

The AI Engineering team at Airwallex is a group of passionate builders and problem-solvers who are obsessed with creating elegant, scalable, and resilient systems that power customer-centric experiences. We operate like a start-up within a scale-up, building innovative technology to tackle a trillion-dollar opportunity. Our engineers bring deep technical expertise and a practical mindset, balancing long-term architecture with rapid, thoughtful execution.

This role will be part of our newly formed AI team, where we are setting out to build Agentic Finance as we prepare for a post-SaaS world and move up the value chain from delivering not just finance infrastructure and tooling, but finance work.

You’ll lead the design and development of frontend interfaces that connect users with AI agents performing real financial work. This includes architecting responsive, high-performance UIs that visualise agent reasoning, real-time status, and outcomes. As a staff engineer, you’ll set technical direction, mentor other frontend developers, and collaborate deeply with ML, data science, and backend teams to turn complex systems into seamless, intuitive user experiences.

This role is based in San Francisco

• Lead the delivery of complex frontend features using React and TypeScript, including technical scoping, requirements breakdown, estimation, and strategic planning in collaboration with cross-functional teams.

• Architect and maintain micro-frontend applications following domain-driven design principles to ensure modularity, scalability, and performance.

• Partner closely with product managers and key stakeholders to shape the product roadmap, prioritise initiatives, and deliver iteratively with measurable impact.

• Own and evolve our frontend-backend integration layer using Apollo GraphQL, building robust backend-for-frontend (BFF) services that scale with the product and team needs.

• Guide and collaborate with design teams to develop and evolve a shared design system and component library that balances consistency and flexibility.

• Drive excellence through active leadership across Frontend, mentoring peers, championing best practices, reducing technical debt, and introducing innovative tools and frameworks.

• Foster a culture of quality, performance, and reliability by working across teams to ensure operational excellence and a polished user experience.

We’re looking for people who meet the minimum qualifications for this role. The preferred qualifications are great to have, but are not mandatory.

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

• Deep expertise in modern frontend technologies, particularly in React and TypeScript, with a track record of delivering user-facing products at scale.

• Strong product thinking and a customer-first mindset; able to translate complex requirements into intuitive user experiences.

• Excellent system design and architecture skills; write maintainable, well-documented, and testable code.

• Demonstrated proficiency with frontend testing strategies and tools.

• Effective communicator and collaborator, experienced in working across engineering, product, and design disciplines.

• Expertise in scalable frontend architectures, micro-frontends, and domain-based design.
  Experience working with Apollo GraphQL (client and server), BFF patterns, and node-based services.

• Familiarity with testing frameworks like Cypress, Playwright, and React Testing Library.

• Exposure to fintech or financial systems, particularly in payments, card issuing, or similar domains.

• Experience with Kotlin or shell scripting in a full-stack context.

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.

Compensation Range: $175K - $300K