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.

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
• Domain bridge
• Team foundation & growth
• Data Integrity & Scale

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.

... (additional technical responsibilities omitted for brevity) ...

• 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, 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, Fin Crime, 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.

• 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 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.
• You thrive in a collaborative environment and have experience working effectively with cross‑functional peers like designers, product managers, analysts and data scientists.
• Expert in schema design, indexing strategies, and query optimization for ACID‑compliant transactional data. Experience with partitioning and read‑replicas for scaling.
• Handling unstructured data at scale, implementing sharding, and optimizing aggregation pipelines for high‑speed reads/writes and flexible schema evolution.
• Leveraging Redis or Valkey for high‑performance distributed caching.
• Experience working with Kafka and SQL/No‑SQL databases in complex backend systems where reliability and data consistency are critical.

• Gross…