Engineering Lead - Verification Platform
Wise · London, United Kingdom · 3d ago
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.
More about our mission and what we offer.
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 — a small business getting paid on time, a migrant worker sending money home, a nonprofit moving funds across borders. There's a less visible side of this too: money launderers, fraudsters, sanctioned entities and organised crime networks actively try to exploit these same rails, and the harm they cause lands hardest on the people with the fewest defences against it. Getting Business KYC right is how we keep the door open for the first group and quietly close it on the second — and in this role, you'll be directly shaping that, globally.
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. There are three organisations in the wider squad — Business Onboarding Verification, Personal Onboarding Verification, and Wise Platform Verification.
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.
Our verification systems are not supporting tools — they are core production infrastructure that protects customers, enables growth, and must stay reliable under constant change in regulations, policies and evolving threat patterns.
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 (Onboarding Platform for business, requirement evaluation, collection, review, unified vendor integrations, repapering rails) that lets BoV Global and regional teams iterate safely and quickly on business verification without rebuilding plumbing. Concretely, this team owns three work-streams:
Onboarding Platform (for business) — modelling Business requirements as configuration-as-a-service, per legal-entity type (Ltd, LLC, Sole Trader, Partnership, Corp), with versioned rules and repapering / refresh rails so a policy change is a config choice, not a multi-quarter project.
Review tooling platform — the review surface on which Global (and regional teams) build their review flows; the foundation that makes AI-assisted review and review automation measurable and safe to roll out.
Unified Vendor Integrations — one observable, retryable, swappable gateway for registry, adverse media, website signal, Acceptable Use Policy and Business Onboarding data vendors, replacing today's point-to-point integrations.
Your mission
As the Engineering Lead for BOV Platform, you will:
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 — make sure 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 — not what the platform team thinks the platform should be.
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 — leading by example.
Own the health and productivity of the team, fostering a culture of ownership, transparency, bottom-up decision-making, collaboration and continuous improvement — the way Wise engineering works.
Own operational excellence. Ensure appropriate on-call rotas, SLAs, documentation and observability for platform services; run incidents in your area of ownership and turn each into a durable fix.
Collaborate globally with engineering leads across Global KYC and Onboarding (London, Tallinn, Budapest and Hyderabad) and the wider Wise engineering community.
Run the engineering rituals of the team so we stay agile and predictable in product development.
Why this is an exciting problem
Picture a pharmaceutical company incorporated in Singapore, with one shareholder living in Dubai, trading in the UK and Singapore. In one signup, that business touches at least four regulatory perimeters — Singapore, UK, UAE for the shareholder, plus industry-specific controls for pharma (enhanced due diligence, sanctions, source-of-funds). Our job is to work out — in real time — exactly what each regulator needs, verify it against the right sources, and hand the customer a signup that feels effortless. Now scale that across 160+ countries and the millions of businesses we have. BOV Platform is building the framework that makes this possible without a new (or at most minimal) codebase per market, and the interesting problems stack up:
Configuration-driven, versioned rules at scale. How do we express "what KYC do we need for entity type × country × industry × partner × risk tier?" as data — hot-reloadable, auditable, and safe to change weekly — while giving regulators a clean audit trail of which version passed which customer?
Distributed decisioning under real-world latency. A single verification decision fans out to 10+ internal services and external vendors (registry lookups, sanctions, PEP, document verification, ML models). Sagas, idempotency, timeouts, and graceful degradation all matter — because "we couldn't reach the sanctions provider" isn't an acceptable customer experience.
Consistency vs. availability on the KYC decision path. The same customer hits us from web, mobile and partner APIs concurrently. Where is strong consistency non-negotiable (a compliance-gated transfer) vs. eventual consistency fine (background re-screening)? How do we avoid decision drift across regions and entities?
Event-driven re-evaluation and repapering. Rules change; a country updates its policy; a customer's risk profile shifts. How do we re-decide retroactively across millions of customers without stampeding downstream systems or ops queues?
ML/AI in the loop — safely. Where does automation genuinely help (document classification, risk scoring, agent copilots), where does it not, and how do we ship it with safe fallbacks, clear observability and a human review path that doesn't become the bottleneck?
That's the problem your team will help solve — with real regulatory teeth, real customer impact, and enough platform surface area to keep senior engineers engaged for years.
Qualifications
A bit about you
You have proven experience leading and mentoring software engineers, including managing performance, well-being and growth, and handling difficult situations constructively (360 feedback, calibration, performance reviews).
You have built and led platform / infrastructure teams whose customers are other engineering teams — you know how to say no, how to prioritise for leverage, and how to keep a platform from turning into a bespoke-request queue.
You have solid Java (17+) knowledge and hands-on experience with Spring / Spring Boot, and you're happy to stay hands-on when the team needs it.
You have strong system-design skills with real experience of distributed, high-throughput, resilient services — event-driven architectures, sagas, idempotency, orchestration vs. choreography trade-offs.
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 — including trade-offs between short-term product wins and long-term platform health.
You approach challenges with a strong product and customer mindset, prioritise customer needs (both external customers and the internal teams you serve), and make data-driven decisions.
You have excellent communication skills — you can articulate complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences, and are comfortable working across geographies and time zones.
You show strong ownership and accountability, are able to operate beyond a purely technical scope, and act as an enabler for the extended team.
What you can expect as an Engineering Lead at Wise
We don't measure seniority by years of experience, but by the impact you create and the complexity of problems you help solve. You will experience leading a product engineering team first-hand — one of Wise's unique strengths. As an EL1 at Wise, you will:
Lead a cross-functional platform team, with a clear scale-up path as BOV Platform's remit grows (requirements, review platform, vendor gateway, repapering).
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 (BOV Global, Personal Onboarding, Wise Platform, Mitigation Handling, Risk & Compliance) to build conviction to unblock opportunities.
Build strong relationships with the sister BOV Global crew and with the wider Global KYC and Onboarding squad across London, Tallinn, Budapest and Hyderabad.
Embrace long-term ownership of projects while training other engineers to reduce single points of failure; identify gaps and plan ahead for hiring.
Be active in architecting and designing services that allow for iterative delivery and future scaling — through feedback and reviews. 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.
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.
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