Airwallex
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Airwallex AI Engineering Team in San Francisco
Our SF AI Engineering team at Airwallex is building production-grade AI that automates the hardest parts of global finance — from payments and onboarding to reconciliation, bookkeeping, and tax. Sitting on top of our proprietary global payments infrastructure and massive real-time transaction datasets, we design and ship vertical AI systems — from LLM-powered copilots and agentic workflows to fine-tuned models — that reach customers quickly and at scale. We’re a small, senior, zero-ego group with high ownership: engineers work end to end from problem framing and experimentation through to deployment and evals, using the right tool for the job to turn deep AI work into visible, shipped impact.
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Team FAQs
What's the culture like in AI Engineering at Airwallex in San Francisco?
What's the culture like in AI Engineering at Airwallex in San Francisco?
The culture is tight-knit, senior, and builder‑led: a small, collaborative, zero‑ego team with high standards, direct communication, and a strong bias for ownership and shipping fast without unnecessary process.
What's the AI Engineering leadership like at Airwallex in San Francisco?
What's the AI Engineering leadership like at Airwallex in San Francisco?
SF AI leaders communicate in a problem‑first, outcome‑driven way. They frame real customer and business problems, set a few clear metrics, then give engineers wide autonomy on how to solve them. Expectations are simple and high: own problems end to end, move fast with tight feedback loops and demos, be candid about trade‑offs, and keep the bar high without adding unnecessary process.
What's it like to work in AI Engineering at Airwallex in San Francisco?
What's it like to work in AI Engineering at Airwallex in San Francisco?
A typical day as an SF AI engineer at Airwallex mixes deep technical work with visible impact. Mornings often start by scanning dashboards and logs, reviewing how your latest model, copilot flow, or agent performed in production, then iterating on prompts, features, or evals. Midday you might pair with another engineer to design an agentic workflow, tighten latency, or debug an edge case, then push changes behind a flag. Afternoons lean into quick design reviews, working with product or risk partners to sharpen success metrics, and shipping small, frequent experiments that move from notebook to customers in days, not quarters.
Employee Reviews
Adrian joined Airwallex two years ago and built the product data science and growth data science teams from scratch, growing them to 19 data scientists with U.S. expansion underway. His teams drive product optimization, customer acquisition, and marketing efficiency using ML and AI. A standout example: Optimize 360, where his team deployed contextual bandits to boost payments success rates, delivering a 10x increase in payments volume. Adrian is equally focused on his people, fostering a culture of ownership, autonomy, and psychological safety. As the company scales toward $1B ARR, his team's scope keeps growing, with data scientists owning company-level projects end to end.
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Ishan leads at the intersection of AI and product at Airwallex, where innovation isn't a department but the operating system. Under his leadership, the team has embedded an AI assistant directly into the Airwallex platform that acts as an intelligent guide, using context and specialized agents to execute complex tasks like configuring accounts and scheduling payments on behalf of customers. He champions a "rebuild" mindset, where teams build at speed knowing that as AI models improve, products should evolve with them. Ishan has also helped reshape how Airwallex hires engineers, testing for AI proficiency rather than memorization.
JP leads the foundations of the company's AI architecture, steering models and building secure, reliable integrations with internal infrastructure—all while balancing customer data protection with the vast possibilities of AI. He has grown significantly by collaborating with platform partners and learning from in-house product subject matter experts.
JP is energized by the infinite workflows that emerge from combining different financial actions into autonomous agents, and is eager to build AI-powered self-improving pipelines that multiply internal productivity and accelerate feature delivery for customers.
Akankshita works at the intersection of AI and regulatory compliance, wiring intelligence into real money flows while building robust guardrails to keep customers safe. She is currently refining the context engineering layer to make agents smarter—nudging users toward actions based on their own past behavior—work that translates directly into growth.
She thrives on the challenge of introducing probabilistic technology into a rule-based, highly regulated domain, and finds deep motivation in seeing painful user workflows transformed into seamless agent-driven experiences.
Our Products
Optimize 360
Optimize 360 is Airwallex's payments optimization engine. It uses contextual bandits to intelligently route transactions and maximize acceptance success rates for customers in real time. The result: a sustained uplift in payments performance and a 10x increase in payments volume. It's a flagship example of how Airwallex combines ML and AI to solve real problems at scale.
Optimize 360 deployed contextual bandits to optimize payments acceptance success rates for our customers, directly delivering a sustained uplift in performance and a 10x increase in payments volume. It's proof that Airwallex doesn't just process payments, it makes them smarter.
Airwallex AI Assistant
Airwallex has launched a suite of AI-powered tools, referred to as an "AI Assistant," designed to act as a concierge for global financial operations, reducing manual work and streamlining business setup. The AI assistant is integrated directly into the Airwallex WebApp, leveraging large language models (LLMs) to understand business context, answer questions, and execute tasks.
Airwallex's AI assistant doesn't just answer questions. It understands your context, creates a tailored onboarding journey, and uses a network of specialized agents to execute complex tasks on your behalf, from configuring accounts to scheduling international payments.
What People Are Saying About Airwallex
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Autonomy: Engineers in the SF AI team are expected to own problems end-to-end, from framing and experimentation through deployment and evaluation, with leaders setting outcomes and giving wide latitude on approach. On-site collaboration in San Francisco supports tight design–build–validate loops for customer-visible AI features.
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Innovation & Products: AI engineers in San Francisco ship agentic systems and an in-product assistant on core payments and risk paths, emphasizing real production surfaces over sandbox demos. Internal AI-enabled tooling and a tool-agnostic stack reinforce rapid applied innovation.
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Low Bureaucracy: The SF AI group operates as a small, builder-led, zero-ego team focused on shipping quickly without unnecessary process. Experiments run behind flags with strong guardrails, enabling rapid iteration while meeting fintech reliability needs.
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At a glance
how we impact our community
Airwallex Impact is a global social impact initiative backed by a 1% equity commitment to philanthropic giving, plus 1% of employee time, profits, and products. By taking the 1% Pledge, Airwallex joins leaders like Atlassian, Canva, and Salesforce in multiplying corporate philanthropy. The program builds on existing initiatives including AU$3M+ in university scholarships and Airwallex for Startups. "As we enter our 10th year, the time is right to commit to an enduring impact program," says CEO Jack Zhang. "Airwallex Impact is a natural extension of our dedication to innovation and economic development in the countries where we operate.
our mission + vision
At Airwallex, our vision is bold: to build the future of global banking. As one of the leading global financial platforms, we’re continuing to build technology that empowers businesses to thrive without limits. We’re not here to follow the future. We’re creating it today, for the businesses of tomorrow.
