Backend Software Engineer - Recurring Payin

The Recurring Payin team owns the Direct Debit API that powers automated payments into Wise. Underneath this, we are building a platform that allows customers to easily schedule top-ups or business collections. The platform is built on top of our internal Payin Platform rails, a critical component of the Wise money‑movement machine, and we’re looking for an engineer motivated to help us build for this.

We primarily offer APIs for any partner looking to set up automated funding or pre‑authorisations, from setting up GBP balance top‑ups automatically to allowing business partners to collect EUR bills monthly without having the customer go through the flow each time. We aim to allow customers to give a one‑time permission (pre‑authorization) for Wise to pull money across any payment method, a USD bank account or a EUR issued bank card — you name it.

Job Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test, and maintain backend services written in Java and Kotlin using the Spring Boot framework, deployed on cloud infrastructure (AWS).
• Build and maintain RESTful APIs that serve millions of customers across web and mobile platforms.
• Develop and optimise services powering the card pay‑in payment method, one of the most popular payment methods, enabling Wise customers to move around £1 billion every month.
• Design and implement database schemas, write and optimise SQL queries against PostgreSQL databases handling high‑volume transactional data.
• Build and maintain event‑driven architectures using Apache Kafka for asynchronous processing of financial events across distributed services.
• Develop and maintain a payment orchestration system that dynamically routes payments across Payment Service Providers to optimise for cost and reliability.
• Write automated tests (unit, integration, and end‑to‑end) to ensure correctness and reliability of financial systems.
• Conduct code reviews for team members, ensuring code quality, security, and adherence to engineering standards.
• Participate in on‑call rotations to monitor and respond to production incidents for Tier 2 critical services.
• Collaborate with product managers, designers, analysts, and engineers across other teams to deliver cross‑functional projects.
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks, scalability issues, and technical debt in existing systems.
• Ensure development follows security best practices, particularly around handling of sensitive financial data and compliance with financial regulations.

Qualifications

• Great communication skills and the ability to articulate complex, technical concepts to non‑technical audiences.
• Ability to work independently while also being a good team player; your work will frequently involve cross‑team collaboration.
• Ability to break down complex projects into incremental milestones that deliver customer value.
• Experience in developing web applications and distributed systems in a production environment.
• Experience with common design and architectural patterns coupled with a passion for writing clean code that is performant and well‑tested.
• Curiosity and drive for continuous learning and improvement.
• Following and advocating best coding practices, continuous delivery and code reviews.
• Experience working with relational and non‑relational databases, query optimisation and designing schemas is a plus.
• Knowledge of Java and Spring Boot and experience with a messaging system, like Kafka, is a plus.

What does success look like?

• You’ll have onboarded and found your place through understanding your team and tribe vision and how you can contribute.
• You’ll understand how our values can help you guide your work.
• You’ll understand the reasons behind problematic payments and customer difficulties and how to go about solving them.
• You’ll be raising the automation level to enable scaling of the product.
• You’ll understand our customers and the impact our product makes in their lives.
• You’ll help us scale‑up and build a world‑class global banking product by finding solutions to our technical challenges and opportunities.

What do we offer?

Starting salary: 68,000–87,500 GBP + RSUs. Wise Benefits. 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.