Staff Software Engineer, AI Tooling
Airwallex
San Francisco, CA · $200k–$280k a year · Posted June 5, 2026
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Where San Francisco, CA ranks
Where San Francisco, CA placed in our monthly rankings, month by month. Each month stays online at its own address.
November 2026
- #1Best cities for security jobs316 openings · of 20
- #1Best cities for technology jobs7,178 openings · of 100
- #1Best cities for financial services pay after cost of living$173k · of 33
- #1Best cities for entry-level jobs that want AI skills35% · of 100
- #1Best cities for entry-level jobs that want AI skills in the West Coast35% · of 54
- #1Cities with the most jobs that do not need a four-year degree in the West Coast902 jobs · of 47
Rankings about data & analytics jobs
- Best cities for data and analytics jobs #1 New York (1,713 openings)
- Best cities for data and analytics pay after cost of living #1 Foster ($232k)
- Most requested AI skills in data and analytics jobs #1 Machine learning engineering (17.1%)
- AI tools named most often in data and analytics jobs #1 Databricks (7.6%)
- Employers with the most data and analytics jobs #1 Amazon (711 roles)
Data & Analytics jobs · Top Data & Analytics employers · All rankings
Pay compared with the market
This listing pays about $240,000 a year. Across 426 open staff software engineer listings that state pay, the middle half runs $225,000 to $271,000 and the median is $242,500. That is inside the middle half of those listings, 1% below the median.
Listed pay is what employers advertise, not what people are paid.
Staff Software Engineer salaries by state · Check your own pay
How AI is used in this kind of work
Among software developers, AI is already used for some of the tasks. Measured exposure for software developers: 29% (some).
Share of this job’s tasks that AI is already used for at work, from real usage. It is not a forecast of job loss, and a low number means no use seen yet. Source: Anthropic Economic Index.
Skills this job asks for
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About the job
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 development of AI tools and applications used by Airwallex employees, turning ideas into working apps, dashboards, workflow tools, and internal automation. You’ll partner with teams across the company to identify high-impact opportunities, including streamlining how we operate, supporting threat hunting and incident response, and building tooling around large-scale log pipelines.
- Lead AI tools and applications from inception through implementation, helping employees turn ideas into useful internal products.
- Build automation and ad hoc tooling that supports threat hunting, incident response, remediation, and security scanning.
- Build, monitor, and maintain the infrastructure behind these tools, including Kubernetes clusters, serverless workloads, ETL pipelines, and large-scale log pipelines.
- Partner with engineering teams to identify opportunities for automation and develop services that improve security outcomes, including patching automation and gateways that reduce risk.
- Mentor engineers and help grow a strong engineering team.
You’ll work from our San Francisco office three days a week.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
Essentials
- A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Security, or a related field.
- 8+ years of experience as a software engineer.
- Experience working with production codebases.
- Experience with at least one scripting language, such as Python, and one systems programming language, such as Go or C/C++.
- Experience with modern cloud infrastructure, including data pipelines, serverless workloads, and Kubernetes.
- Experience owning projects autonomously and delivering high-quality work on time.
- Strong communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to work effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- The ability to dive deep to find the best solution to a problem.
- Curiosity and a willingness to ask questions, gather context, and learn.
Preferred
- Experience working in a high-growth technology company.
- Hands-on experience with AI, particularly using AI to build applications.
- Experience maintaining Linux operating systems.
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 with ambiguity. Give you a problem, not a prescription, and you'll run with it.
- You default to action. You'd rather course-correct in motion than wait for perfect clarity.
- You can advocate hard for a position, then fully support the team's direction once a call is made.
LEARN MORE ABOUT YOUR TEAM
InfoSec at Airwallex runs one of the most modern security teams in the world, protecting hundreds of thousands of customers and hundreds of billions of dollars. Our scale, funding, and industry make us a real target, so we skip the standard playbook of off-the-shelf tools and tiered SOC analysts and build almost everything ourselves, often with AI ahead of the rest of the industry. You'll go back to first principles constantly, because the off-the-shelf answer is rarely right for us, and we can build better than what already exists. If you want to build security from the ground up, against a real adversary, with people who are actually good at this, this is the team for you.
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.