Lead AI Engineer

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,