When it comes to building a business, especially one as dynamic as ours, it’s not just about what you do, it’s about who you are. We’ve learned some tough lessons on our journey, and they’ve taught us that the right mindset is more valuable than a perfectly matched experience.
We’re looking for a special kind of talent. Not just people with credentials, but successful builders with a founder-like energy. They’re the ones who want real impact, accelerated learning, and true ownership. If you’re a problem-solver who sees a challenge and immediately starts building a solution, you’ll fit right in.
Why We Hire Builders, Not Just Resumes
Early in our journey, we made a classic startup mistake. We hired people with stellar resumes: ex-bankers, payments veterans, and others who had worked at big-name companies. On paper, they looked perfect. But we soon learned a hard truth: Expertise without a builder’s mindset can slow a company down. These individuals knew how things used to work, not how things should work. Morale dipped, and momentum slipped. We quickly adjusted our approach.
Our Co-founder and President Lucy Liu put it best in her interview on Aug 20, 2025 for the BBC World Service show, Business Daily, which posed the question – “Are you a personality hire?” She told the programme: “Early in our journey, we were looking for people from finance or banks because we thought experience might equal capability. But what we’re building is new, fresh, and different. We actually look for people who are problem-oriented.” She says process‑oriented people—often shaped by large, established companies—rarely fit our fast‑paced, ambiguous environment. They default to “how we’ve always done it,” while we need builders who start from the ground up.
The takeaway was clear: In a startup, mindset scales faster than experience. The wrong hires can cost more than just time; they can derail your culture.
What We Look For
Over the years, we’ve refined our hiring philosophy to focus on the core traits that help people thrive and succeed at our company. These aren’t just words on a page, they’re the qualities that drive our innovation and define our culture. If this sounds like you, you’re the type of builder we want on our team.
Builders with Grit
Rather than admiring problems, you tackle them head‑on. Faced with ambiguity, you break it down, ship, learn fast, and iterate. And when it’s hard, you run toward it and finish strong. You get things done end to end: you take zero-to-one ideas and turn them into real products.
That’s the mindset driving t0, our AI finance automation team. We’re building production-ready AI to eliminate founders’ financial busywork—automating payments, payroll, bookkeeping, and taxes. By working backward from customer pain points, selecting the right AI for each job (prompting, in‑context, fine‑tuning, agentic), and iterating fast. Small, experienced, and backed by Airwallex’s global fintech rails, they have real autonomy and are aiming for outsized impact.
Determination and Optimism
Our mission and our operating principles inspire you. Energized by building the future of global banking, you spot opportunities around corners rather than obstacles.
This spirit is what drove us to launch U.S. Payment Acceptance, in April 2024, enabling localized, multi-currency checkout and expanding acceptance to 35 markets, an optimistic, zero-to-one leap in a highly competitive space.
Curiosity
You think deeply, challenge assumptions, and learn quickly. Our work requires us to build entirely new infrastructure, not just repeat old playbooks. This means we need people who are naturally curious and use first principles thinking to balance speed with rigor.
Lucy Liu agrees, stating that our most successful people have “intellectual curiosity, grit, and the ability to think deeply and independently.” She says that these traits “consistently outperform and help us to solve complex problems and move really quickly.”
Our team lives this every day: they speak at industry events, co-host panels, and share insights beyond their day-to-day work. In June 2025, Andy Chow delivered a keynote on Airwallex’s AI-native vision at the Google Cloud Summit Hong Kong, presenting alongside leaders from Cathay, DFI, Prudential, and BEA to an audience of over 500+ tech leaders.
Strong Problem-Solving
You thrive on tackling complex problems, a quality we found to be especially critical in our product and engineering roles. You’re a sharp analytical thinker who can design and build solutions from scratch, while using AI to work smarter and solve problems faster.
To become truly AI-native and empower our people, we’ve rolled out internal tools that already lift speed and quality: Our AI code reviewer achieves an 86% positive rate before production, and our AI testing tool cuts test generation from 3 days to 15 minutes, a 93% efficiency gain. It’s why Fast Company named us a Most Innovative Company and Forbes included us on the Cloud 100.
Team Fit
You thrive in a diverse, global environment, joining over 1,800 teammates across 26 offices and a wide range of backgrounds. Lucy notes, “We don’t stereotype… we care about how you think, collaborate, and grow.” We seek low-ego, collaborative teammates who are additive to our culture and can thrive in a global environment. While it’s not always easy to manage teams across different time zones and cultures, she says it “makes us a very diversified and global team,” adding that our company is “getting a lot better at it, to allow for that cultural nuance.”
What We Don’t Over-Index On
At Airwallex, your credentials don’t define your success. To make sure we’re hiring for the right things, we’ve also learned to de-emphasize a couple traits that others might prioritize.
- Big-name logos or industry tenure: They can be useful, but they’re not sufficient.
- Process for process’s sake: We value systems that unlock speed, not bureaucracy.
Your Career, Accelerated
You’ll thrive here if you turn ambiguity into impact and lean into hard problems with high standards. You’ll tackle complex, high-visibility challenges with exceptional teammates and grow your career as we build the future of global banking.
This is a unique opportunity to build with a team that values speed, substance, and character. We evaluate candidates with structured, practical assessments that mirror real work, with an emphasis on problem orientation over process orientation.
If this sounds like you, let’s build what’s next. Apply here, and show us how you build.
