--- title: 'Lead AI Engineer at Airwallex' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/lead-ai-engineer-airwallex-singapore-9tx3p3m8svfz' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-09' --- # Lead AI Engineer at Airwallex - **Company:** [Airwallex](https://feeny.ai/companies/airwallex) - **Location:** Singapore - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-08-26 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/airwallex/02234e0a-e1fc-4b23-b3e6-513200e4ff80 ## Job description ## ABOUT AIRWALLEX 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 250,000 businesses worldwide – including Brex, 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 2,300 of the brightest and most innovative people in tech across 27 offices around the globe. Valued at US$11 billion and backed by world-leading investors including T. Rowe Price, Visa, Mastercard, Robinhood Ventures, Sequoia, Salesforce Ventures, DST Global, and Lone Pine Capital, 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. ## ATTRIBUTES WE VALUE We hire successful builders with founder-like energy who want real impact, accelerated learning, and true ownership. You bring strong role-related expertise and sharp thinking, and you’re motivated by our mission and operating principles https://www.airwallex.com/us/operating-principles. You move fast with good judgment, dig deep with curiosity, and make decisions from first principles, balancing speed and rigor. You're humble and collaborative; turn zero‑to‑one ideas into real products, and you “get stuff done” end-to-end. You use AI to work smarter and solve problems faster. Here, you’ll tackle complex, high‑visibility problems with exceptional teammates and grow your career as we build the future of global banking. If that sounds like you, let’s build what’s next. ## ABOUT THE TEAM Kai is Airwallex’s AI assistant, designed to help customers to accomplish complex financial work with great speed and control. We are building trusted agentic experiences that can understand intent, retrieve the right business context, reason over product and data, and take appropriate actions. As Engineering Lead, you will own the technical design, execution, and people leadership for Kai engineering team. You will turn rapidly evolving LLM and agent capabilities into reliable, observable, and safe production systems that solve meaningful customer and business problems. This is a hands-on leadership role. You will set a high bar for architecture and engineering quality, grow a strong team, and work closely with Product, Design, Data, Security, Infrastructure, and domain teams across Airwallex. You will balance rapid learning with the rigor required for a global fintech platform. ## WHAT YOU'LL DO As the Lead engineer in our Generative AI department, you will lead the team and help define the technical and strategic vision for next-generation AI solutions. You will drive engineering excellence across Kai. Your work will set the standard for AI engineering excellence, paving the way for the next wave of intelligent products and services. This role is based in Singapore. ## RESPONSIBILITIES: - Lead and grow an exceptional team: Manage, coach, and develop a team of AI, backend, and frontend engineers. Set clear expectations, build an inclusive high-performance culture, and raise the engineering bar through hiring, feedback, and technical mentorship. - Evolve technical architecture for Kai: Define and evolve the architecture for agent orchestration, context and retrieval, tool integrations, identity and access control, observability, and evaluation systems. Make sound trade-offs across quality, latency, reliability, cost, security, and time to market. - Build trusted AI products: Lead the delivery of production-grade AI features from discovery through launch and iteration. Establish clear product and model success metrics, instrument customer journeys, and use real-world feedback to continuously improve Kai’s usefulness and trustworthiness. - Make evaluation and safety release disciplines: Build repeatable, versioned evaluation practices for task success, groundedness, tool use, safety, and domain-specific failure modes. Define launch criteria, staged-rollout and rollback mechanisms, and monitoring that detects regressions as models, prompts, and data evolve. - Deliver resilient, scalable systems: Drive engineering excellence across service design, APIs, data pipelines, reliability, performance, cost efficiency, testing, incident response, and operational readiness. Define and improve SLOs for critical Kai services. - Partner across the business: Work closely with Product, Design, Data, Security teams to translate business needs and model capabilities into secure, coherent customer experiences. Communicate technical decisions and risks clearly to stakeholders. - Enable responsible action-taking: Champion robust authentication, authorisation, permission checks, auditability, and human-in-the-loop patterns for agent actions. Ensure Kai behaves predictably and appropriately in the context of Airwallex’s customers, products, and regulatory obligations. - Build for leverage: Create reusable agent platforms, developer tooling, quality frameworks, and engineering standards that allow multiple teams to safely ship high-quality AI experiences. ## WHO YOU ARE We're looking for people who meet the minimum qualifications for this role. The preferred qualifications are great to have, but are not mandatory. ## MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS: - Experienced engineering leader: 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. - Hands-on Agent builder: You have deep experience designing and operating scalable agentic architecture, backend or distributed systems. - AI product and platform fluency: You understand the engineering realities of retrieval, model integration, agent workflows, evaluation, observability, and changing model behaviour. - Quality and reliability driven: You bring a disciplined approach to evaluation, monitoring, incident management, performance, and operational readiness. You know that AI quality requires measurement and iteration, not intuition alone. - Security-minded: You understand secure software design and appreciate the importance of authentication, authorisation, data protection, auditability, and abuse prevention in systems that access sensitive data or initiate actions. #singapore ## APPLICANT SAFETY POLICY: FRAUD AND THIRD-PARTY RECRUITERS To protect you from recruitment scams, please be aware that Airwallex will not ask for bank details, sensitive ID numbers (i.e. passport), or any form of payment during the application or interview process. All official communication will come from an @airwallex.com http://airwallex.com email address. Please apply only through careers.airwallex.com http://careers.airwallex.com or our official LinkedIn page. 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. ## EQUAL OPPORTUNITY 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. ## About Airwallex ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Airwallex is a financial technology company building a unified global payments and banking platform that helps businesses manage cross-border payments, treasury, spend, and financial operations through proprietary infrastructure, software, and AI. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series G) - **Headquarters**: Dual headquarters in Singapore and San Francisco, USA; founded in Melbourne, Australia - **Founded**: 2015 - **Founders**: Jack Zhang (CEO), Lucy Liu, Max Li, Xijing Dai, and Ron Li ## Core Business - Primary industry: Financial Services / Payments / Fintech Infrastructure - Target customers: B2B, primarily serving SMBs, scaling enterprises, digital platforms, and marketplaces globally - Mission or purpose statement: "Build the future of global banking" — they aim to replace legacy, fragmented banking systems with a borderless, intelligent, real-time financial operating system for modern businesses. ## Products & Services - **[Business Accounts]**: Multi-currency global accounts to receive, hold, and manage funds in 20+ currencies, with local account details for key markets. - **[Payments]**: Global payment acceptance via 160+ local payment methods, low-code checkout, and programmatic payout capabilities to 200+ countries. - **[Spend / Corporate Cards]**: Multi-currency corporate and employee cards with customisable spend controls, designed for global teams. - **[Expense Management]**: A platform to track, control, and reconcile global business expenses, including employee reimbursements. - **[Billing & Subscription Management]**: A billing platform for usage-based and subscription pricing models, supporting AI companies and complex revenue workflows. - **[Platform APIs]**: API-first infrastructure enabling businesses to embed financial services (accounts, payments, FX, card issuing) into their own products. - **[FX & Treasury]**: Interbank foreign exchange rates and tools to intelligently manage currency risk across markets. ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: US$11 billion (latest valuation in 2025, following a fresh investment round). - **Key Metric**: US$1.8 billion in total funding raised; Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) surpassed US$1 billion by 2025. - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Series G investors include prominent global venture capital firms (specific names not listed in source but backed by top-tier VCs); serves over 200,000 businesses including TikTok, Brex, Rippling, Navan, Qantas, and SHEIN. - **Growth Signals**: - US$287 billion in global payments processed (USD). - 92% of transfers settled same-day, 50% processed instantly. - Over 85 financial licenses and registrations globally. - Team of ~2,300 people across 27 offices internationally. - Dual-headquarters model (Singapore + San Francisco) adopted in 2025 to support next phase of growth. ## Competitive Advantages - Proprietary, API-first infrastructure built from scratch (not riding legacy banking rails), enabling faster, cheaper, and more transparent cross-border transactions. - Unified platform combining banking, payments, spend management, billing, and FX — reducing the need for multiple vendors. - Deep AI integration across the platform to automate financial operations and provide intelligent insights. - Extensive regulatory licensing (85+ licenses) across major markets, creating a high barrier to entry. - Strong network effects: serves both direct businesses and platforms/marketplaces that embed Airwallex into their offerings. ## Strategic Focus - Continue scaling the platform to support the rapid growth of AI-native companies and usage-based business models (highlighted by the launch of their global billing platform). - Expand the dual-headquarters presence to tap into the largest tech talent markets (San Francisco and Singapore). - Invest heavily in AI to build "interconnected, intelligent financial systems where money, data, and decisions move together." - Deepen product capabilities to automate financial operations end-to-end for global businesses. ## Why Work Here - High-growth, ambitious environment: described as "the most ambitious work of your career" by the company; founded in 2015 and already processing $287B in payments. - Global impact and scale: work on infrastructure used by 200,000+ businesses, from startups to enterprises like TikTok and SHEIN. - Hybrid/office culture: 27 offices globally (Melbourne, Singapore, San Francisco, London, Shanghai, Amsterdam, and more) offering opportunities to work across teams and locations. - Engineering-driven culture: heavy emphasis on building proprietary technology, AI, and developer-first products. - Notable perks: opportunity to work on a modern financial stack, exposure to cutting-edge AI/Fintech intersection, and a diverse, international team of "2,200 of the brightest and most innovative people in tech." ## Sources 1. [airwallex.com - Who We Are](https://www.airwallex.com/en-eu/who-we-are) 2. [airwallex.com - Global Platform](https://www.airwallex.com/global) 3. [careers.airwallex.com](https://careers.airwallex.com/) 4. [LinkedIn - Airwallex](https://www.linkedin.com/company/airwallex) 5. 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