Senior Staff Software Engineer
At a glance
Senior Engineering Leadership role at Wise. London · full-time · £145,000–£182,000 base.
techroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Shape onboarding systems for new markets and customer groups while keeping response times and reliability strong
- Set technical agreements and integration points between onboarding, marketing, financial crime and identity-check teams
- Build and evolve the customer path from account setup through their first completed transfer
- Lead work that improves core onboarding systems' upkeep, response time and operating costs
What you bring
- Production experience with Java or a comparable object-oriented language, plus modern service-based architecture
- A strong record building and scaling distributed systems that handle substantial traffic
- Experience designing shared components or core infrastructure used by multiple teams
- You can set technical direction, develop other engineers and explain complex decisions across technical and nontechnical groups
Who this fits
This is a senior individual-contributor engineering role focused on technical direction across teams, not a people-management position. It suits someone who has built customer-facing products and wants to own core onboarding systems at scale. The role is based onsite in London.
From the employer
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 life 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.
More about our mission.
About the role:
We're looking for a Senior Staff Engineer (IC5) to join our Consumer Onboarding team. Our mission is to guide personal customers through setting up their Wise account and resolving their first international money needs in a way that's clear, easy, and delightful.
Onboarding is one of the most critical moments in a customer's journey with Wise. Get it right, and we build trust from day one. Because we sit at this key point in the customer journey, we deal with high volumes of traffic and need to balance speed, scale, and reliability with a smooth user experience. This makes it an exciting space for engineers who want to solve complex problems at scale while having a direct, visible impact on millions of customers.
How we work:
At Wise, we believe in autonomy, alignment, and impact. As an IC5 engineer, you won't just be executing tasks - you will be a visionary. You will own fundamental components and shared systems, collaborate across multiple teams, and define the long-term technical strategy for onboarding. We value open communication, high technical standards, and a genuine focus on solving real customer problems.
What will you be working on?
In the near future, you will be driving technical solutions for our biggest upcoming challenges:
- Scalable Onboarding Architecture: Designing systems that can support rapid growth in new markets and customer segments without compromising speed or reliability.
- Cross-Team Technical Alignment: Defining the technical contracts and integration points between Onboarding and other teams across Wise, such as Marketing, FinCrime, and KYC.
- End-to-End Journey Ownership: Building and evolving robust, scalable onboarding flows from account creation through to a customer's first successful transfer.
- System Health & Performance: Leading initiatives to improve the maintainability, latency, and cost efficiency of our core onboarding systems.
What do you need?
- Deep Backend Expertise: Solid, production-proven experience with Java (or similar OOP languages) and modern (micro)service architectures.
- Distributed Systems Knowledge: Strong experience building and scaling distributed, high-throughput systems.
- Advanced Architecture Skills: Experience owning and designing fundamental components, shared libraries, or core infrastructure used across multiple teams.
- Technical Leadership: The ability to set a clear technical vision for your area of ownership, and to mentor and grow engineers around you.
- Product & Customer Mindset: A strong track record of building customer-facing products, with a good sense of how technical decisions affect the end user.
- Strong Communication: Excellent collaboration skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences, and to align stakeholders across teams.
Nice to Have:
- Experience working closely with Frontend and/or Mobile engineers and design teams.
- Background in high-growth consumer products or fintech.
- Experience leading company-wide technical initiatives or working groups
Interested? Find out more:
Wise Engineering – https://medium.com/wise-engineering
What do we offer:
Starting salary: 145,000 - 182,000 + RSUs
Interested in more than one role?
If you're interested in multiple roles, please apply for just one—the one you're most excited about. If you submit multiple applications requiring the same assessment, we'll continue your recruitment journey using your first application, and any duplicate applications will be automatically closed. This helps ensure a fair and consistent interview process. If another role feels like a better fit, you can discuss this with your recruiter during the process
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.
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