Engineering Director - Platform

Company Description

Wise is a global technology company, building the best way to move and manage the world's money.

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.

More about our mission and what we offer.

The Platform Engineering tribe provides the core capabilities that enable Wise to build and run its products  scope is broad, covering compute and data infrastructure, build and release systems, ML and AI capabilities, and incident and resilience tooling, among others – all within a highly innovative and regulated environment. The platform drives mission‑aligned outcomes across reliability, efficiency, productivity, and risk. Today, the tribe consists of 30+ teams.

As Wise continues to grow and the technology landscape evolves, we need to continually adapt and strengthen our platform to support the next phase of scale. We are expanding our leadership team to help shape this evolution. This role sits within our senior platform leadership group.

We're looking for a proven leader to join us and do things differently.

This is a senior leadership role with line management responsibility, combined with a broader mandate to shape the direction of platform engineering at Wise.

You'll start by leading a focused team while taking ownership of a broader, cross‑team priority, with scope expected to grow as the function evolves. While you'll begin with a focused team, your impact will extend well beyond it through influence across the wider engineering organisation.

The primary focus is shaping the next evolution of our platform as a cohesive system of capabilities that supports how engineering teams build, ship, and operate software. This includes responding to how emerging technologies, such as AI, are changing developer workflows and platform expectations.

We will also improve how we ensure reliability, evolve platform capabilities, and introduce standards and practices where they create leverage – while enabling teams to operate with autonomy.

You'll work closely with teams across Wise to align priorities, introduce new ways of working, and help shape how this space evolves over time.

• Lead and develop a small, high‑impact team
• Set clear direction and ensure delivery against key priorities
• Own and drive cross‑engineering strategic initiatives focused on evolving platform capabilities
• Work across squads to align on priorities, standards, and ways of working
• Define and introduce platform standards and practices where they create leverage
• Improve engineering effectiveness by evolving platform capabilities, developer workflows, and feedback loops
• Translate emerging technologies and trends into practical applications
• Help shape operating models, team responsibilities, and ways of working that support scalable engineering
• Partner with senior stakeholders to shape strategy and influence decisions
• Use data and insight to guide direction and measure impact

• Proven experience operating at Director (or equivalent) level within platform or engineering, with strong experience across the software development lifecycle
• Strong track record of leading through influence, not just formal authority
• Experience owning and delivering cross‑team or organisation‑wide initiatives
• Comfortable working across multiple squads and aligning different priorities
• Ability to define and drive strategic themes (e.g. platform, developer experience, or technology shifts)
• Ability to think strategically while staying close to execution
• Hands on mindset; able to go deep when needed as well as set direction
• Strong problem‑solving skills; able to bring clarity to complex and ambiguous areas
• Excellent stakeholder management; able to influence senior leaders and peers
• Clear communicator; able to simplify complex ideas for different audiences
• Data‑driven approach; uses data to guide decisions and measure…