Senior Data Engineer I - Global KYC & Onboarding in London

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.

Job Description

We're looking for an experienced Senior Data Engineer to join our Global KYC & Onboarding squad within the FinCrime organisation. You will be instrumental in designing and building the data pipelines, storage infrastructure, and analytical data models that power customer onboarding and financial crime controls across the globe. This role sits directly between core engineering microservices and product analytics. While customer-facing systems fire dozens of raw operational events per verification flow, our analytics and machine learning teams require structured, clean, and reliable metrics to steer the business. You will own the data journey between these two worlds, transforming high-volume operational events into observable, audit-ready analytical datasets.

Operating across our squad's three core pillars—Business Onboarding Verification, Personal Onboarding Verification, and Wise Platform Verification (our B2B Wise-as-a-Service solution)—you will be the driving force behind modernising our verification data ecosystem, focusing on:

• Data Ingestion & Pipelines: Designing and maintaining robust ETL/ELT pipelines that ingest high-volume, event-driven data from verification services and transform it into reliable analytical stores.
• Domain Data Modelling: Mapping complex transactional events into coherent, business-accurate data models that define how customer onboarding funnels, verification triggers, and conversion metrics are tracked.
• Platform Modernisation: Collaborating with software engineering to replace 8-year-old legacy verification infrastructure with modern, scalable data flows built for true "config-change" flexibility.
• Observability & Auditability: Ensuring that every onboarding flow and FinCrime control is measurable, auditable, and transparent out-of-the-box for regulatory compliance and product health monitoring.

What will you be working on?

You will join the squad at an exciting inflection point. We were the first team at Wise to establish dedicated data engineering, and you’ll join our team of data engineers to scale and professionalise this foundational capability across the entire verification domain. The core challenge for the team—and your immediate focus—is modernising our data layer while the squad delivers the new Onboarding Platform. We don't hide away for two years to build a finished product; we ship iteratively, learn, and replace legacy components in place. You will ensure that as new platform capabilities go live, our data models, pipelines, and reporting layers scale seamlessly alongside them.

Your immediate impact will be to:

• Bridge Engineering & Analytics: Translate raw system inputs into clean, aggregated data models that empower Product Analysts and Data Scientists to measure KPIs, conversion funnels, and control pass rates without having to untangle backend service logs.
• Modernise Verification Data Architecture: Build and standardise production pipelines in Python and Airflow, replacing ad-hoc queries and fragmented scripts with robust, automated data infrastructure.
• Improve Performance & Scale: Optimise data-intensive workflows and queries, resolving latency bottlenecks and ensuring data consistency across personal, business, and platform onboarding spaces.
• Set Data Engineering Standards: Partner with engineering, analytics, and compliance to define shared data contracts, pipeline monitoring best practices, and automated testing frameworks across the squad.

Qualifications

What do you need?

• Strong Python Fundamentals: Solid software engineering skills in Python with the ability to write clean, maintainable code, navigate complex algorithms, and optimize data-intensive tasks for performance and computational efficiency.
• Advanced SQL & Data Modelling: Extensive experience designing normalized and dimensional data models, paired with strong proficiency in crafting, debugging, and tuning complex SQL queries over large-scale datasets.
• Pipeline & Workflow Orchestration: Proven track record building, scheduling, and monitoring production pipelines using modern workflow orchestrators such as Apache Airflow.
• Systems & Data Architecture Mindset: Experience handling high-throughput event data and a deep understanding of analytical databases, storage formats, and execution plans.
• Ownership & Pragmatic Autonomy: Comfortable working in an evolving domain, taking vague or cross-functional problems from raw concept through to production implementation without hand-holding.
• Collaborative Partner: Proven ability to communicate effectively across boundaries—collaborating closely with Software Engineers, Data Scientists, Product Analysts, and operational stakeholders to align on contracts and schemas.

Nice to Have:

• Hands-on experience with modern data transformation tools like dbt.
• Familiarity with distributed compute and storage platforms (e.g., Kafka, Spark, Snowflake, or Presto/Trino).
• Experience in product-led SaaS, fintech, or high-growth tech environments navigating complex event tracking or onboarding funnels (prior FinCrime or KYC experience is not required).

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. 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.

If you want to find out more about what it's like to work at Wise visit Wise.jobs. Keep up to date with life at Wise by following us on LinkedIn and Instagram.