Senior Software Engineer II - Screening Controls in London

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.

You will be joining the Screening team, which builds and operates the control framework that screens customers, counterparties, and transactions across all Wise products. Our systems prevent the onboarding of sanctioned individuals and entities, identify politically exposed persons (PEPs), and detect adverse media risk, all while keeping the customer experience as invisible and frictionless as possible. You will ensure associated risks are thoroughly mitigated and that controls are functioning effectively.

In this role, you will collaborate closely with our Compliance teams to understand which checks are required, when to run them, and how best to implement them. You will also work hand‐in‐hand with our regional and growth teams to support their onboarding processes with FinCrime and screening solutions, ensuring smooth, efficient integration across all regions.

The systems you build must meet a high bar for scale and requirements, including:

• Processing tens of millions of screening events with sub‐second end‐to‐end latency targets for real‐time flows.
• High availability, deterministic and auditable outcomes, strong data lineage, and privacy‐by‐design.
• Integrations with multiple data providers and regional regulatory lists.

What will you be working on?

• Design and build scalable, fault‐tolerant screening services for sanctions, PEP, and adverse media across batch and real‐time flows.
• Meet product SLOs for latency and availability by implementing strong observability, retry mechanisms, and graceful degradation strategies.
• Lead technical initiatives, mentor engineers, and raise engineering standards through reviews, design docs, and measurable reliability and quality improvements.
• Drive platform capabilities that let new Wise products integrate "out of the box" with screening.
• Partner with Compliance and Regional product teams to define controls, timings, and rollout plans that meet regulatory obligations without unnecessary friction.
• Evolve data models and schemas, ensuring auditability and data lineage across event streams and storage.

What do you need?

• You have 7+ years of Java 8+ knowledge, experience with Spring framework and microservice best practices.
• Strong experience with event‐driven architectures and asynchronous messaging systems, such as Kafka.
• Hands‐on experience working with relational and non‐relational databases, query optimisations, designing and evolving schemas.
• A proven track record of leading technical initiatives and mentoring other engineers.
• Being able to work autonomously on customer problems is a key to success – you take responsibility and end‐to‐end ownership of your projects: drive and own them to make sure we hit the goals we want to achieve.
• Great communication skills (both verbal and written) and the ability to articulate complex, technical concepts to non‐technical audiences.
• You believe in and follow best coding practices, code reviews and open feedback.
• Curiosity and a drive for continuous learning and improvement.

Nice To Have

• FinCrime or KYC experience: sanctions, PEP, adverse media, fuzzy matching, risk scoring.
• Building low‐latency, high‐availability systems in regulated environments with strong security, privacy, and audit controls.

Starting salary: £105,000-£130,000 + RSUs

For everyone, everywhere. 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. Inclusive teams help us live our values and make sure every Wiser feels respected, empowered to contribute towards our mission and able to progress in their careers.