Lead AI Engineer

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 https://www.airwallex.com/en-us/operating-principles to see it in full. HOW YOU'LL MAKE IMPACT You’ll lead the technical design, execution, and people leadership for Kai, Airwallex’s AI assistant for complex financial work. You’ll turn rapidly evolving LLM and agent capabilities into reliable, observable, and safe production systems that understand intent, retrieve business context, reason over products and data, and take appropriate actions. You’ll set the technical direction for agent orchestration, context and retrieval, tool integrations, identity and access control, observability, evaluation, and responsible action-taking, while balancing quality, latency, reliability, cost, security, and time to market. You’ll work closely with Product, Design, Data, Security, Infrastructure, and domain teams to deliver trusted AI products and reusable platforms that can scale across Airwallex. You’ll manage, coach, and develop AI, backend, and frontend engineers, set clear expectations, and raise the engineering bar through hiring, feedback, and technical mentorship. You'll work from our Singapore office five days a week. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR ESSENTIALS - You have 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years leading, managing, or formally mentoring engineers. - You have a track record of building strong teams and delivering complex products end to end. - You have deep experience designing and operating scalable agentic architecture, backend systems, or distributed systems. - You understand the engineering realities of retrieval, model integration, agent workflows, evaluation, observability, and changing model behaviour. - You bring a disciplined approach to evaluation, monitoring, incident management, performance, testing, and operational readiness. - You understand secure software design, including authentication, authorisation, data protection, auditability, and abuse prevention. - You can define and evolve technical architecture across agent orchestration, context and retrieval, tool integrations, identity and access control, observability, and evaluation systems. - You can lead the delivery of production-grade AI features from discovery through launch and iteration. - You can establish product and model success metrics, instrument customer journeys, and use real-world feedback to improve AI usefulness and trustworthiness. - You can build repeatable, versioned evaluation practices for task success, groundedness, tool use, safety, and domain-specific failure modes. - You can define launch criteria, staged-rollout and rollback mechanisms, and monitoring that detects regressions as models, prompts, and data evolve. - You can drive engineering excellence across service design, APIs, data pipelines, reliability, performance, cost efficiency, testing, incident response, and operational readiness. - You can define and improve SLOs for critical AI services. - You can champion robust authentication, authorisation, permission checks, auditability, and human-in-the-loop patterns for agent actions. - You can create reusable agent platforms, developer tooling, quality frameworks, and engineering standards that allow multiple teams to safely ship high-quality AI experiences. - You communicate technical decisions and risks clearly to stakeholders and work effectively with Product, Design, Data, Security, Infrastructure, and domain teams. YOU'LL THRIVE HERE IF - You're comfortable owning the roadmap yourself. - You hold yourself to a high standard even when no one is watching. Quality and accountability aren't external expectations, they're internal ones. - You're comfortable with ambiguity. Give you a problem, not a prescription, and you'll run with it. - You communicate clearly and directly across cultures, and you're thoughtful about how context shifts meaning across borders. - You simplify complexity rather than hiding behind it. LEARN MORE ABOUT YOUR TEAM AI at Airwallex is building the path from financial software to autonomous finance. At the center of this vision is Kai, Airwallex’s AI assistant and the intelligent interface to our global financial platform. Kai connects AI with capabilities across payments, accounts, transfers, cards, expenses, and other financial workflows—enabling customers to describe what they want to achieve while the system handles more of the complexity underneath. You’ll build intelligent financial products and autonomous agents that understand business context, plan and reason across multi-step workflows, execute actions within clearly defined controls, and learn from outcomes. The work spans agent architecture, orchestration, context and knowledge systems, ontology, evaluation, governance, monitoring, and reliability. The challenge is uniquely demanding: AI systems are probabilistic, while moving money requires precision, permissions, auditability, deterministic controls, and regulatory compliance. You’ll help define where AI should reason and where financial infrastructure must remain deterministic