Senior ML Engineering Lead - Financial Crime in London

Wise is a global technology company, building the best way to move and manage the world’s money. 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.

About the role:

Wise protects millions of customers and billions in transactions from fraud, money laundering and financial crime. Our ML systems are the front line of defense - operating at a global scale of 100K requests/minute under strict sub-50ms latency SLAs. We need an exceptional technical leader to own how these models are engineered, shipped and scaled. You will own the full model lifecycle standard for financial crime detection - from offline experimentation to production deployment and real-time monitoring and build the team to execute it. Your job is to build the automated engineering ecosystem and organisation that scales this safely to hundreds of models.

This is a rare greenfield leadership role with strong investment and engagement from Wise's CTO and senior leadership.

How we work:

Risk ML sits within Wise's FinCrime organisation, owning the full ML and AI foundation for financial crime detection. We're have three dedicated pillars - Feature Platform, Learning Loop and Risk Modelling. You'll lead the Risk Modelling pillar, leading a team of Senior ML Systems Engineers and Applied ML Engineers. We operate with high autonomy and low hierarchy. You'll own the engineering strategy end-to-end - from architecture decisions and infrastructure design through to hiring, team culture and cross-platform partnerships. We value leaders who shape direction and build teams, not just manage delivery.

What will you be working on?:

• The Model Factory: Architect the declarative pipeline that turns a configuration file into a deployed, monitored model - the engineering backbone for scaling to hundreds of models.
• The Experimentation Engine: Establish the reusable path from research (partnering with DS Research) to high-throughput production for traditional and modern architectures.
• Model Operations: Build the infrastructure for automated retraining, drift detection, threshold simulation/management and audit trails - the operational layer required to run hundreds of models safely at scale.
• The Team: Recruit, lead and mentor a world-class team of ML engineers. Establish a high-performance, engineering-first culture from scratch - setting hiring standards, technical bar and growth paths.
• Cross-Platform Partnership: Define and navigate the partnership with key platform teams - owning the build vs consume decisions for your pillar.

What do you need?:

• You've explicitly led or built an ML Engineering or model lifecycle automation team (not just used one) at a high-growth company - you defined the standards that other engineering teams followed.
• System-level and mathematical depth: you can design a model factory architecture, review a training pipeline & debug a runtime inference latency regression.
• Experience in high-throughput environments where latency constraints are tight and model failures carry massive financial consequences.
• Track record of hiring and developing senior engineers - you've built a team, not just inherited one.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity and make architecture-level decisions with incomplete information - this is a greenfield build, not an optimisation role.
• Strong enough technically to guide and review across deep learning, ML systems and production infrastructure - you lead through depth, not just delegation.

Nice to Have:

• Experience at a tier-1 fintech or payments company.
• Experience with graph-based methods (GNNs, entity resolution) in production.
• Foundation model fine-tuning or LLM evaluation experience.
• Experience establishing ML engineering practices in organisations transitioning from classical ML to deep learning.

What do we offer:

Starting salary: £135,000 - £175,000 + RSUs.

Wise Benefits.

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.