Staff Software Engineer, New Products

About Airwallex Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. More than 675,000 businesses, including McLaren Racing, Qantas, SHEIN, and TikTok, use us, directly or through our platform partners, to run their financial operations or build and monetize financial products of their own. We started in Melbourne in 2015 to build the infrastructure global commerce runs on. We're the regulated backbone behind global payments: not by accident, but by design. A decade plus, 85+ licenses, and a financial infrastructure spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. We're co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, with more than 2,700 people across 27 offices. We hire builders with founder-level energy, people who move fast with good judgment, dig in with real curiosity, and make calls from first principles rather than waiting to be told what to do. Read our operating principles to see it in full.   How you'll make impact The Founders’ Lab turns ambitious, high-level concepts into functional software and new product lines. You’ll work across product and engineering to validate ideas quickly, build practical solutions, and establish the foundations for products that can scale within Airwallex. • Partner directly with the CEO and global leadership to translate strategic visions and emerging AI capabilities into functional, market-ready software. • Lead the technical evaluation and implementation of fintech AI technologies and intelligent workflows, identifying how they can best serve Airwallex’s financial platform. • Make pragmatic architectural decisions by prototyping quickly to validate ideas, then structuring successful solutions so they can be handed off and scaled. • Own delivery across the stack, steering backend architecture and systems design while building complete solutions from data models through to user interfaces. • Establish the technical foundations for successful incubation projects and help transition them into standalone product lines within Airwallex. You'll work from our London office with a hybrid working model. What we're looking for Essentials • 10+ years of software engineering experience, including operating at Staff level or leading technical direction in greenfield environments. • Strong product sense: you look at engineering through a commercial lens and care about user experience, business impact, and why a product is being built—not just the code itself. • Comfort with ambiguity: you enjoy working where requirements aren’t fully defined and can independently map technical specifications from high-level direction. • A pragmatic, resourceful, and self-directed approach to solving problems and working through technical or institutional blockers. • Deep backend and full-stack capabilities, with solid fundamentals in high-performance backend ecosystems and the practical ability to build frontend interfaces when moving quickly. • Clear communication skills, with the ability to discuss deep technical trade-offs with core infrastructure teams and present simplified product outcomes to executive stakeholders. Preferred • Experience building software that leverages Generative AI, LLMs, or automated agent workflows. • Experience in fintech, payments, multi-currency ledgering, or regulated financial systems. • Prior experience as a founding engineer, technical lead of an R&D team, or technical co-founder. You'll thrive here if • You're comfortable owning the roadmap yourself. • You own the outcome and you don't wait for permission to fix what's broken. • You're comfortable making decisions with incomplete information and moving quickly anyway. • You're comfortable with ambiguity. Give you a problem, not a prescription, and you'll r