Engineering Lead - Verification Platform

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.

At Wise, we're on a mission to build money without borders — instant, convenient, transparent, and eventually free. For businesses, that journey begins with verification (KYC), and getting it right is one of the highest-leverage things we do: every business we verify smoothly gets faster access to the financial services they need to grow, and every decision we make well keeps the financial system safer for everyone who relies on it.

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.

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.

You will lead the Verification Platform (under BOV) team in London — a cross-functional engineering team whose mission is to provide the BOV platform 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 as the Engineering Lead for BOV Platform includes:

• 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 — ensure 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.
• 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.
• Own the health and productivity of the team, fostering a culture of ownership, transparency, bottom-up decision-making, collaboration and continuous improvement.
• 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 and the wider Wise engineering community.
• Run the engineering rituals of the team to stay agile and predictable in product development.

Qualifications:

• You have proven experience leading and mentoring software engineers, including managing performance, well-being and growth.
• You have built and led platform / infrastructure teams whose customers are other engineering teams.
• You have solid Java (17+) knowledge and hands-on experience with Spring / Spring Boot.
• You have strong system-design skills with real experience of distributed, high-throughput, resilient services.
• 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.
• You approach challenges with a strong product and customer mindset, prioritise customer needs and make data-driven decisions.
• You have excellent communication skills — you can articulate complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences.
• You show strong ownership and accountability, and act as an enabler for the extended team.

What you can expect as an Engineering Lead at Wise:

• Lead a cross-functional platform team, with a clear scale-up path as BOV Platform's remit grows.
• Own the technical roadmap and vision for your team and contribute to the product roadmap and vision for BOV.
• Propose ideas to improve and grow the BOV platform; work with stakeholders to build conviction to unblock opportunities.
• Build strong relationships with the sister BOV Global crew and with the wider Global KYC and Onboarding squad.
• Embrace long-term ownership of projects while training other engineers to reduce single points of failure.
• Be active in architecting and designing services that allow for iterative delivery and future scaling.
• Get hands‑on when the team absolutely needs it, to stay in touch with the technology stack.
• Collaborate closely with product, analytics, compliance and operations to ensure smooth and effective delivery.

We're people building money without borders — without judgement or prejudice, too. We believe teams are strongest when they are diverse, equitable and inclusive. We're proud to have a truly international team, and we celebrate our differences.