Engineering Lead (Contacts & Recipients, Java Team)

Requirements

• Strong technical background: Expert in backend engineering (Java ecosystem preferred) with a track record of designing complex, distributed systems. You understand the difference between "working code" and "scalable architecture."
• Leadership experience: You have led high-performing teams (hiring, performance management, coaching). You know how to manage a large team by delegating effectively to senior engineers.
• Product mindset: You understand the "why" behind the "what." You can map technical efforts directly to business goals and customer value.
• Strategic thinking: You can switch between reviewing a Pull Request and planning the 12-month technical strategy for a critical business domain.
• Communication: Excellent communicator, capable of articulating technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
• (Desirable) Experience in fintech, payments, or "Identity/Graph" data domains.
• (Desirable) Experience building high-throughput APIs for enterprise/platform clients.
• (Desirable) Previous experience scaling a domain from a single team into multiple squads.

What the job involves

• The Contacts team is a core team at Wise, dedicated to making adding, finding, and managing your recipients as easy as possible. We own this experience end-to-end: from the scalable platform securing tens of millions of bank accounts customers send to, to the intelligent search algorithms and local integrations (like Pix) that power discovery, all the way to the customer-facing screens where users interact with their counterparties. The team is integral to Wise’s day-to-day operations — if our services go down, Wise goes down.
• You will be working on reimagining the contacts domain. We need to fundamentally rethink how we model people, businesses, and bank accounts. You and your team own the architecture for this: it’s a complex distributed systems challenge that touches everything: bank accounts, local payment networks, and the next generation of Wise features.
• Scaling for Wise Platform: This isn't just for the Wise app. Big banks and enterprises use our API, which means our search and validation engines need to be lightning-fast and bulletproof, even when our biggest partners turn on the tap.
• Defining the product roadmap: You’re not here to just churn through a backlog. You’ll work side-by-side with your Product Manager to figure out what we build next. You’ll be the one making the tough calls between shipping fast, staying secure, and building for the long term.
• Growing the team: You will start with a large, high-output team with the potential to scale it further.
• Technical authority: You will act as the primary technical owner for the domain. You must meet the expertise bar of a senior back-end engineer, capable of driving deep architectural discussions and addressing technical debt autonomously.
• Operational excellence: Drive initiatives to improve reliability and security. You will ensure the team proactively manages the health of the services that process millions of critical customer data points daily.
• Team autonomy: Lead, mentor, and coach a team of 9 engineers, building a culture where the team can deliver quickly and reliably without your day-to-day intervention in every task.
• People development: You are responsible for the performance and career growth of your engineers, identifying future leaders who can help you scale this domain.
• Cross-functional alignment: Work closely with Regional teams, Wise Platform, and other functions to ensure our roadmap aligns with the wider Wise strategy. You will help the team navigate complex priorities and make trade-offs between speed, risk, and quality.