Engineering Lead II - Contacts & Recipients (Java team) in London

Wise is a global technology company, building the best way to move and manage the world’s money. We’re on a mission to make people’s lives easier and help them save money, whether they’re sending money to another country, spending abroad, or making and receiving international payments. As part of our team, you will help create an entirely new network for the world’s money.

The Contacts team is a core team at Wise, dedicated to making adding, finding, and managing recipients as easy as possible. We own this experience end‑to‑end: from the scalable platform that secures tens of millions of bank accounts customers send to, to intelligent search algorithms and local integrations (like Pix) that power discovery, to the customer‑facing screens users interact with. The team is integral to Wise’s day‑to‑day operations – if our services go down, Wise goes down.

What Will You Be Working On

• Reimagining the contacts domain – fundamentally rethink how we model people, businesses, and bank accounts. You and your team own the architecture for this distributed systems challenge that touches bank accounts, local payment networks, and the next generation of Wise features.
• Scaling for Wise Platform – the search and validation engines must be lightning‑fast and bulletproof, even when our biggest partners turn on the tap.
• Defining the product roadmap – work side‑by‑side with your Product Manager to decide what to build next and make tough calls between shipping fast, staying secure, and building for the long term.
• Growing the team – start with a large, high‑output team with the potential to scale further.

Technical Responsibilities

• Technical authority – act as the primary technical owner for the domain, meeting the expertise bar of a senior back‑end engineer and driving deep architectural discussions and addressing technical debt autonomously.
• Operational excellence – drive initiatives to improve reliability and security and ensure the team proactively manages the health of services that process millions of customer data points daily.

Leadership Responsibilities

• Team autonomy – lead, mentor, and coach a team of nine engineers, building a culture where the team can deliver quickly and reliably without daily intervention.
• People development – manage performance and career growth, identify future leaders to help scale the domain.
• Cross‑functional alignment – work closely with Regional teams, Wise Platform, and other functions so the roadmap aligns with the wider Wise strategy and navigate complex priorities.

Requirements

• Strong technical background: expert in backend engineering (Java ecosystem preferred) with a track record of designing complex, distributed systems.
• Leadership experience: have led high‑performing teams (hiring, performance management, coaching) and delegate effectively to senior engineers.
• Product mindset: understand the “why” behind the “what” and map technical efforts directly to business goals and customer value.
• Strategic thinking: switch between reviewing pull requests and planning 12‑month technical strategy for a critical business domain.
• Communication: excellent communicator, capable of articulating technical concepts to non‑technical stakeholders.

Nice to Haves

• Experience in fintech, payments, or identity/graph data domains.
• Experience building high‑throughput APIs for enterprise/client platforms.
• Previous experience scaling a domain from a single team into multiple squads.

We believe teams are strongest when they are diverse, equitable and inclusive, and are proud to have a truly international team. We celebrate our differences so that every Wiser feels respected, empowered to contribute towards our mission and able to progress in their careers.