Software Engineer Intern (Jan to Jun 2027)

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.

What You'll Do:

The intern will design, develop, and deploy production-ready capabilities for Airwallex’s Spend Cards and Issuing platform. The project may span card lifecycle management, spend controls, transaction visibility, APIs, or customer-facing card experiences.

Project scope/overview:

• Technical design scoping: Create workflow diagrams, identify dependencies, expected inputs and outputs, and define success criteria (e.g., latency, accuracy, cost).
• Feature development: Build and integrate production-ready Cards and Issuing capabilities across backend, APIs, and frontend where needed.
• Testing & observability: Add automated testing and set up observability dashboards with logging, metrics, and alerts to monitor performance and reliability.
• Deployment: Deploy the completed capability to production and validate it with real users.

Project Milestones:

1. Technical design sign-off: Finalise workflow diagrams, success criteria, and technical design documentation.
2. MVP development: Build Cards or Issuing capability and validate key flows.
3. Production readiness: Complete testing, observability, and integration requirements.
4. Deployment and showcase: Release the capability and present the outcome to the wider Engineering team.

Expected learning:

• Card issuing concepts, including card lifecycle, spend controls, and transactions
• API and distributed systems design
• Production engineering including testing, observability, and reliability
• Frontend for customer-facing experiences
• Building within a global fintech platform

Planned role & responsibilities

• Actively participate in team standups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives to align with engineering priorities.
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners (e.g., Operations, Finance, Infosec) to understand workflow requirements and validate outputs.
• Contribute to code reviews, testing, and documentation.
• Deliver bi-weekly project updates and participate in mid-point and final showcases to demo project.
• Design, develop, and deploy an assigned Cards or Issuing project under mentor guidance.

Outline of onboarding process steps in team:

• Buddy assignment: Pair with a senior engineer/mentor for end-to-end feature lifecycle walkthrough, and weekly technical check-ins.
• Tools orientation: Setup access to relevant AI and development tools
• Domain familiarization: Walkthrough of identified finance operational workflows (e.g., cash reconciliation, PO approvals) with relevant domain experts

Proposed schedule of Review Check-ins:

• Monthly check-in for progress review and feedback sharing
• Final Review: at 24 weeks (End-of-project showcase)

Eligibility requirements

• Able to commit to a 6 month placement period, ideally commence in Jan ‘27 through to June 2027.
• Able to commit to Full Time hours for the duration of the placement.
• Are a current student in Singapore, studying towards a formal tertiary qualification at a recognised university.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills.
• Desire to learn and grow with Airwallex as a technologist.

Minimum skills & experience:

• Proficiency in Python, with strong software engineering fundamentals.
• Ability to design and implement AI-driven systems that automate workflows and improve customer experiences.
• Strong skills in system design and critical thinking, building elegant abstractions over complex patterns, especially in financial services.
• Proven track record of writing clean, high-quality, production-grade code and ensuring robust interactions between services.
• Experience working with production AI systems, adhering to best practices in engineering, security, and AI governance.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to partner across technical and non-technical teams.

Preferred skills & experience:

• Proficiency in Kotlin, Typescript or Javascript.
• Familiarity with MLOps practices and deployment pipelines for AI-driven products (e.g., model serving, monitoring, retraining).
• Experience with vector databases, orchestration frameworks (LangChain, Ray, etc.), or event-driven systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ).
• Exposure to cloud AI/ML services (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including GPU orchestration and scalable model deployment.