Senior Backend (Java) Engineer

Company Description

Wise is a global technology company, building the best way to move and manage the world’s money.
Min fees. Max ease. Full speed.

Whether people and businesses are sending money to another country, spending abroad, or making and receiving international payments, Wise is on a mission to make their lives easier and save them money.

As part of our team, you will be helping us create an entirely new network for the world's money.
For everyone, everywhere.

More about our mission and what we offer.

Job Description

We are looking for an experienced Senior Backend Engineer to join and contribute significantly to one of our core teams within the Identity Risk Platform squad.

This is a critical, high‑impact role where you will drive the technical design and hands-on implementation for Wise’s Identity Risk Platform, the foundation on which all risk, onboarding, and servicing decisions are built, powering Wise’s global risk platforms and customer experience.

Key leadership focus

•   Architectural ownership

You will be the technical authority for the design, delivery, and operational excellence of our core domains from Identity Risk Platform and related APIs – high‑throughput, low‑latency services, which power all product and risk teams.

•   Domain bridge

You will operate as the primary technical interface between Product squads, Risk/FinCrime, and Verification providers, ensuring clean, reusable API contracts and a unified identity view.

•   Team foundation & growth

You’ll be instrumental in mentoring a multi‑level engineering team, setting the standards and practices that become the foundation for the whole squad.

•   Data Integrity & Scale:

You will contribute to the architectural design and implementation of schemas and data contracts, ensuring high standards for data quality, lineage, auditability, and data consistency across the full identity and account lifecycle.

What will you be working on?

As Senior Engineer for the Identity Risk Platform, your focus will span technical execution, hands-on implementation, and contributing to the technical strategy within a high‑stakes, cross‑functional domain.

• Evolution of our Identity and Account domains:

Lead the hands-on technical design and implementation for the evolution of our core Identity and Account domains. This involves implementing robust API contracts and data schemas, making identity data risk‑aware by design, managing attribute acquisition & lifecycle, and powering new onboarding & product experiences.

• Driving Data Governance:

Implementing and enforcing technical standards for Data Lineage, Data Quality, and Auditability within the Identity Risk Platform. You'll ensure the platform meets stringent regulatory and compliance requirements.

• Scaling the Team and Culture:

Actively mentor and technically guide junior engineers (IC2-IC3) within the team, fostering a high-performance engineering culture through code reviews and technical standards.

• Strategic Stakeholder Alignment:

Serving as the key technical partner to Product, FinCrime, and other Engineering Leads. You will champion the architectural vision for the platform, ensuring technical decisions align with both business agility and security requirements.

• Platform Resilience:

Ensuring the platform is built for high availability, low latency, and massive scale, managing the operational health (SLAs/SLOs) of a critical, real-time risk service.

Qualifications

A bit about you:

• You have a strong product and customer mindset and experience building customer facing products.

• Strong mentorship skills with a passion for supporting and leveling up junior engineers.

• You have strong, hands-on technical experience in OOP Languages (Java) and modern technology stacks on technologies such as REST APIs, microservices, distributed systems and CI/CD pipelines - you will have to complete technical interviews to showcase your knowledge.

• You have experience working with and building distributed, high scalability systems and microservices architectures

• You're a great communicator who can articulate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

• The ability to prioritize, evaluate tradeoffs, and make informed technical decisions, and comfort in leading technical discussions and architecture proposals.