Engineering Lead - Verification Platform in London

hackajob is collaborating with Wise to connect them with exceptional professionals for this role.

Company Description

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. As part of our team, you will be helping us create an entirely new network for the world's money. For everyone, everywhere.

At Wise, we're on a mission to build money without borders — instant, convenient, transparent, and eventually free. For businesses, that journey begins with verification (KYC), and getting it right is one of the highest-leverage things we do: every business we verify smoothly gets faster access to the financial services they need to grow, and every decision we make well keeps the financial system safer for everyone who relies on it.

Job Description

We're looking for an Engineering Lead to manage the Platform team within the Business Onboarding Verification (BOV) organisation — based in London. This team owns the platform rails that Business verification is built on; the sister team (BOV Global) uses those rails to ship customer-facing journeys and agent tooling.

The scale we operate at: In FY2025, 15.6M people and businesses used Wise; we onboarded over 5.9M new customers (~500K/month) and moved £145B across borders (~£400M/day) across 160 countries and 40 currencies. Our onboarding decisions gate ~£25B/year in cross-currency volume. Verification is on the critical path for every new signup and for ~10 product teams across Wise that build on our rails today.

The team you'll lead - Verification Platform

You will lead the Verification Platform (under BOV) team in London — a cross-functional engineering team whose mission is to provide the BOV platform that lets BoV Global and regional teams iterate safely and quickly on business verification without rebuilding plumbing.

Your mission as the Engineering Lead for BOV Platform:

• Lead, coach and mentor a cross-functional team of engineers — supporting their growth, well-being and performance, and empowering them to do their best work.
• Own the technical roadmap for the BOV platform — ensure it addresses real reliability, security and scalability concerns of the Business verification stack.
• Partner deeply with BOV Global, Personal Onboarding, Wise Platform Verification and Mitigation Handling so the platform serves real product needs.
• Be an active contributor to delivery. Support day-to-day execution, get hands-on when the team absolutely needs it, and stay in touch with the technology stack.
• Own the health and productivity of the team, fostering a culture of ownership, transparency, bottom-up decision-making, collaboration and continuous improvement.
• Own operational excellence. Ensure appropriate on-call rotas, SLAs, documentation and observability for platform services.
• Collaborate globally with engineering leads across Global KYC and Onboarding and the wider Wise engineering community.
• Run the engineering rituals of the team so we stay agile and predictable in product development.

Qualifications

A bit about you:

• You have proven experience leading and mentoring software engineers, including managing performance, well-being and growth.
• You have built and led platform/infrastructure teams whose customers are other engineering teams.
• You have solid Java (17) knowledge and hands-on experience with Spring/Spring Boot.
• You have strong system-design skills with real experience of distributed, high-throughput, resilient services.
• You have experience working with relational and non-relational databases, query optimisation and schema design.
• You have led the design and delivery of complex engineering solutions and understand their broader impact on business outcomes.
• You approach challenges with a strong product and customer mindset, prioritising customer needs.
• You have excellent communication skills — you can articulate complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences.
• You show strong ownership and accountability, able to operate beyond a purely technical scope.

What you can expect as an Engineering Lead at Wise:

• Lead a cross-functional platform team, with a clear scale-up path as BOV Platform's remit grows.
• Own the technical roadmap and vision for your team and contribute to the product roadmap and vision for BOV.
• Propose ideas to improve and grow the BOV platform; work with stakeholders to build conviction to unblock opportunities.
• Build strong relationships with the sister BOV Global crew and with the wider Global KYC and Onboarding squad.
• Embrace long-term ownership of projects while training other engineers to reduce single points of failure.
• Get hands-on when the team absolutely needs it, to stay in touch with the technology stack.
• Collaborate closely with product, analytics, compliance and operations to ensure smooth and effective delivery.

Additional Information

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.