Sr Engineering Team Lead - Cloud Foundations

Overview

We are looking for a highly technical Engineering Lead to own our Cloud Foundations domain — the platform that enables safe, scalable, and frictionless cloud usage across Wise. Cloud Foundations provides the “paved path with guardrails” for engineering teams: making it easy to deploy infrastructure while ensuring strong security, governance, and compliance by default.

You will define and evolve how cloud environments are provisioned, accessed, and governed across Wise — primarily in AWS today, with increasing adoption of GCP and other cloud and SaaS providers over time.

As Wise continues to evolve its infrastructure strategy, Cloud Foundations is driving toward a more cloud-agnostic platform model for core compute, storage, and networking capabilities. Our goal is to reduce tight coupling to any single provider API and enable portability, resilience, and strategic flexibility across diverse cloud environments.

You’ll lead a senior-heavy team of 5 engineers, owning critical platform services such as managed cloud accounts, infrastructure deployment tooling, workload access patterns, and shared infrastructure primitives. This is a high-impact role where your work will shape how hundreds of engineers build in the cloud.

• Cloud Foundations Platform Leadership — Define the technical vision and lead the evolution of Wise’s Cloud Foundations platform, balancing developer experience, governance, scalability, and operational resilience across multiple cloud providers.
• Multi-Cloud Strategy & Platform Evolution — Drive Wise’s long-term cloud strategy toward greater cloud portability and reduced provider lock-in for core infrastructure capabilities. Shape platform abstractions and operating models that support diverse cloud providers and SaaS ecosystems.
• Cloud Governance & Automated Guardrails — Design and implement governance built-in, with secure-by-default patterns, policy enforcement, and automated controls that enable teams to move safely at scale.
• Developer Experience & Enablement — Enable teams to deploy infrastructure safely and independently through self-service tooling, paved paths, reusable infrastructure primitives, and excellent platform ergonomics.
• Access, Identity & Zero Trust — Own workload and infrastructure access patterns, evolving Wise’s identity, authentication, and authorization models toward modern zero-trust principles.
• Shared Infrastructure Services — Oversee shared infrastructure primitives including networking, compute foundations, storage patterns, deployment tooling, and cloud account lifecycle management.
• Strategic Execution & Operating Model Evolution — Translate strategic initiatives into actionable engineering plans and measurable OKRs. Drive platform adoption, maturity improvements, and organizational alignment across engineering and security stakeholders.
• Team Leadership — Lead and grow a small, senior-heavy team, creating an environment of trust, ownership, technical excellence, and continuous learning.

We recognise that people come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. You don’t need to meet every requirement below to apply.

• Leadership & Communication — Experience leading, mentoring, or growing engineers and technical teams; strong communication and stakeholder management skills; ability to influence technical direction across teams and present progress clearly to both engineering and business stakeholders.
• Cloud & Platform Engineering Experience — Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS preferred); experience across multiple cloud providers, including at least one non-hyperscaler environment; experience on cloud platform or infrastructure platform teams; understanding of cloud-agnostic architectures; experience supporting or delivering cloud migration or transformation initiatives.
• Infrastructure & Automation — Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code and platform automation; hands-on knowledge of Terraform and related tooling ecosystems; familiarity with policy-as-code approaches and governance automation.
• Security, Governance & Risk — Strong understanding of cloud security, governance,…