Wise on cord

Wise

Engineering Lead

External position
London, UK
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FinTech · Payments
Formerly TransferWise. Still building the world's most international account.
Active
over 6 months ago
Posted
3 weeks ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
2 hours ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Technical Architect
Experience level: Lead
Core skills considered: Java, Spring, Spring Boot, Agile
Other skills considered: System Configuration, Technical Direction, Software Architecture

Logistics

Base salary: £105K - £135K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: On-site
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

We're looking for an Engineering Lead to manage the Platform team within the Business Onboarding Verification (BOV) organisation - based in London. This team owns the platform rails that Business verification is built on; the sister team (BOV Global) uses those rails to ship customer-facing journeys and agent tooling. There are three organisations in the wider squad - Business Onboarding Verification, Personal Onboarding Verification, and Wise Platform Verification.

The scale we operate at

  • In FY2025, 15.6M people and businesses used Wise; we onboarded over 5.9M new customers (~500K/month) and moved £145B across borders (~£400M/day) across 160+ countries and 40+ currencies.
  • Our onboarding decisions gate ~£25B/year in cross-currency volume.
  • Verification is on the critical path for every new signup and for ~10 product teams across Wise that build on our rails today.

Our verification systems are not supporting tools - they are core production infrastructure that protects customers, enables growth, and must stay reliable under constant change in regulations, policies and evolving threat patterns.

The team you'll lead - Verification Platform

You will lead the Verification Platform (under BOV) team in London - a cross-functional engineering team whose mission is to provide the BOV platform (Onboarding Platform for business, requirement evaluation, collection, review, unified vendor integrations, repapering rails) that lets BoV Global and regional teams iterate safely and quickly on business verification without rebuilding plumbing. Concretely, this team owns three work-streams:

  • Onboarding Platform (for business) - modelling Business requirements as configuration-as-a-service, per legal-entity type (Ltd, LLC, Sole Trader, Partnership, Corp), with versioned rules and repapering / refresh rails so a policy change is a config choice, not a multi-quarter project.
  • Review tooling platform - the review surface on which Global (and regional teams) build their review flows; the foundation that makes AI-assisted review and review automation measurable and safe to roll out.
  • Unified Vendor Integrations - one observable, retryable, swappable gateway for registry, adverse media, website signal, Acceptable Use Policy and Business Onboarding data vendors, replacing today's point-to-point integrations.

Your mission

  • Lead, coach and mentor a cross-functional team of engineers - supporting their growth, well-being and performance, and empowering them to do their best work.
  • Own the technical roadmap for the BOV platform - make sure it addresses real reliability, security and scalability concerns of the Business verification stack.
  • Partner deeply with BOV Global, Personal Onboarding, Wise Platform Verification and Mitigation Handling so the platform serves real product needs - not what the platform team thinks the platform should be.
  • Be an active contributor to delivery. Support day-to-day execution, get hands-on when the team absolutely needs it, and stay in touch with the technology stack - leading by example.
  • Own the health and productivity of the team, fostering a culture of ownership, transparency, bottom-up decision-making, collaboration and continuous improvement - the way Wise engineering works.
  • Own operational excellence. Ensure appropriate on-call rotas, SLAs, documentation and observability for platform services; run incidents in your area of ownership and turn each into a durable fix.
  • Collaborate globally with engineering leads across Global KYC and Onboarding (London, Tallinn, Budapest and Hyderabad) and the wider Wise engineering community.
  • Run the engineering rituals of the team so we stay agile and predictable in product development.

Why this is an exciting problem

Picture a pharmaceutical company incorporated in Singapore, with one shareholder living in Dubai, trading in the UK and Singapore. In one signup, that business touches at least four regulatory perimeters - Singapore, UK, UAE for the shareholder, plus industry-specific controls for pharma (enhanced due diligence, sanctions, source-of-funds). Our job is to work out - in real time - exactly what each regulator needs, verify it against the right sources, and hand the customer a signup that feels effortless. Now scale that across 160+ countries and the millions of businesses we have. BOV Platform is building the framework that makes this possible without a new (or at most minimal) codebase per market, and the interesting problems stack up:

  • Configuration-driven, versioned rules at scale. How do we express "what KYC do we need for entity type × country × industry × partner × risk tier?" as data - hot-reloadable, auditable, and safe to change weekly - while giving regulators a clean audit trail of which version passed which customer?
  • Distributed decisioning under real-world latency. A single verification decision fans out to 10+ internal services and external vendors (registry lookups, sanctions, PEP, document verification, ML models). Sagas, idempotency, timeouts, and graceful degradation all matter - because "we couldn't reach the sanctions provider" isn't an acceptable customer experience.
  • Consistency vs. availability on the KYC decision path. The same customer hits us from web, mobile and partner APIs concurrently. Where is strong consistency non-negotiable (a compliance-gated transfer) vs. eventual consistency fine (background re-screening)? How do we avoid decision drift across regions and entities?
  • Event-driven re-evaluation and repapering. Rules change; a country updates its policy; a customer's risk profile shifts. How do we re-decide retroactively across millions of customers without stampeding downstream systems or ops queues?
  • ML/AI in the loop - safely. Where does automation genuinely help (document classification, risk scoring, agent copilots), where does it not, and how do we ship it with safe fallbacks, clear observability and a human review path that doesn't become the bottleneck?

That's the problem your team will help solve - with real regulatory teeth, real customer impact, and enough platform surface area to keep senior engineers engaged for years.

A bit about you

  • You have proven experience leading and mentoring software engineers, including managing performance, well-being and growth, and handling difficult situations constructively (360 feedback, calibration, performance reviews).
  • You have built and led platform / infrastructure teams whose customers are other engineering teams - you know how to say no, how to prioritise for leverage, and how to keep a platform from turning into a bespoke-request queue.
  • You have solid Java (17+) knowledge and hands-on experience with Spring / Spring Boot, and you're happy to stay hands-on when the team needs it.
  • You have strong system-design skills with real experience of distributed, high-throughput, resilient services - event-driven architectures, sagas, idempotency, orchestration vs. choreography trade-offs.
  • You have experience working with relational and non-relational databases, query optimisation and schema design.
  • You have led the design and delivery of complex engineering solutions and understand their broader impact on business outcomes - including trade-offs between short-term product wins and long-term platform health.
  • You approach challenges with a strong product and customer mindset, prioritise customer needs (both external customers and the internal teams you serve), and make data-driven decisions.
  • You have excellent communication skills - you can articulate complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences, and are comfortable working across geographies

Company Benefits

  • Stock Options
  • Private Pension
  • Hybrid WFH Model
  • Paid Sabbatical after 4 years
  • 90 day global remote working
  • Annual Development Budget
Engineering Lead at Wise
Position posted 3 weeks ago

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
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