Customer Insights Lead

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 150,000 businesses worldwide – including Brex, Rippling, 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 1,800 of the brightest and most innovative people in tech across 26 offices around the globe. Valued at US$6.2 billion and backed by world-leading investors including Visa, Airtree, Blackbird, Sequoia, DST Global, Greenoaks, Salesforce Ventures, Lone Pine, and Square Peg, 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.

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. 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.

We’re launching a brand-new Customer Insights function within Operations Strategy. You will be the first hire and the founding force behind a global, follow-the-sun insights team that partners with Product, Sales, Marketing, Commercial, Strategy and Executive leadership.

As the founding Customer Insights Lead, you’ll roll up your sleeves to interview customers, run surveys, analyze data, and deliver crisp, executive-ready reports. You’ll define the insights strategy and roadmap that serve as the company’s single source of truth for customer and competitive intelligence. Partnering with senior stakeholders, you’ll help answer the company’s most important questions and shape key product, go-to-market, and investment decisions. You’ll also lay the foundations to scale a high-performing, distributed insights team across time zones.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA.

• Establish the charter, metrics, and governance for a trusted customer and competitive intelligence hub

• Prioritize the highest-impact questions with Product, GTM, Strategy, Ops, and Executive teams

• Lead customer segmentation, persona mapping, and win/loss analysis

• Personally conduct interviews, surveys, and VoC programs to understand why customers choose, expand with, or leave us

• Build a repeatable process to monitor key competitors and market movements, and maintain dashboards in Looker/Databricks

• Own executive-ready outputs such as the quarterly “Who We Win and Why” report and timely briefings for leadership and Investor Relations

• Provide data-backed narratives for fundraising, M&A, earnings, and board materials

• Build and scale the team: Hire, mentor, and manage a global bench of analysts, researchers, and competitive intelligence specialists across time zones

• Stand up best-in-class tools and processes for survey collection, data analysis, visualization, sentiment mining, and knowledge sharing

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.

• 10+ years in customer insights, market research, competitive intelligence, or strategy within high-growth tech, fintech, or B2B SaaS

• Hands-on researcher: sourcing participants, conducting interviews, running surveys/VoC, analyzing data, and writing concise reports

• Strong analytical foundation and storytelling ability; adept at synthesizing qualitative and quantitative signals into clear recommendations

• Proven experience standing up new teams, processes, or tooling in ambiguous, fast-moving environments

• Excellent stakeholder management; able to partner with Product, Sales, Marketing, Ops, and executive leaders

• Proficiency with research and analytics tools such as Qualtrics/Typeform, SQL, and BI/data platforms like Looker and Databricks

• Strong presentation skills

• Experience building and leading distributed/global insights or research teams across time zones.

• Deep familiarity with payments/fintech customer journeys and market dynamics.

• Track record producing C‑suite and investor-facing deliverables (e.g., win/loss, market models, investment narratives).

• Comfort designing scalable processes, dashboards, and knowledge systems from scratch.

• Willingness to flex hours to collaborate globally and to travel as needed.

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.

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. If you are approached by someone claiming to represent Airwallex, please verify with our team.