Senior Product Manager - Real Time Data Platform

Wise; Greater London; On-site; GBP 88,000 - 118,000; Full time

Job summary

A global technology company is seeking a Senior Technical Product Manager for their Real-Time Data Platform in London. The role focuses on transforming complex infrastructure into user-friendly products, managing Kafka and stream processing technologies. Candidates should have experience in technical product management and a strong ability to simplify complexity. The position offers a salary range of £88,000 to £118,000 plus stock options.

Benefits

Stock options

Wise benefits

Qualifications

• Experience in data platforms or infrastructure products is preferred.
• Willingness to learn Kafka and streaming technologies.
• Experience in user-centered design.

Responsibilities

• Transform complex infrastructure into self-service products.
• Map self-service developer experiences and user journeys.
• Improve monitoring solutions for team usage.

Skills

4+ years as a technical product manager

Understanding of distributed systems

Hands-on experience with data analysis tools

Empathy with users

Simplifying complexity

Driving adoption of technical platforms

Learning by doing

Tools

Python

SQL

pandas

Jupyter notebooks

Job description

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.

Job Description

About the role

Our Real-Time Data Platform encompasses two critical foundations of Wise's infrastructure: our Managed Kafka Platform and our Stream Processing Platform. Together, these platforms power everything from service-to-service messaging to complex real-time analytics across the entire company.

Our Kafka Platform is the nervous system of Wise - managing and maintaining infrastructure that handles billions of messages daily. Teams rely on Kafka for asynchronous messaging, publishing domain events, and enabling real-time data flows. But despite being mission-critical, teams struggle with the complexity of topics, consumer groups, ACLs, and monitoring.

Our Stream Processing Platform builds on top of Kafka to enable real-time computation at scale. We operate 300+ streaming pipelines that power everything from fraud detection, operations, and instant payment decisions.

We're looking for a Senior Technical Product Manager who can transform both these platforms from complex infrastructure into self-service products that teams love to use. You'll work across two interconnected challenges: simplifying Kafka adoption for service teams while democratising stream processing for analysts and engineers alike.

How we work

We work differently and we’re proud of it. Our teams are empowered to solve the most urgent and relevant problems they see for our customers. We all share the responsibility of making Wise a success. We empower Wisers to make decisions and take ownership of how they work best. Teams and individuals have different needs – that’s why we have company-wide principles, and then our teams set their own guidelines.

What will you be working on

Transform infrastructure to product

• Understand why teams struggle with streaming and Kafka basics - from topic creation to consumer group management

• Map our and Design self-service developer experiences and user journeys that hide complexity while maintaining the power of our Kafka and streaming

• Build monitoring solutions that help teams understand their usage without needing to be experts

• Help design abstractions for common patterns like event publishing and async messaging to be used by Engineers and Analysts

• Improve the developer experience from configuration to production deployment

Improve stream processing accessibility

• Lead the Flink migration while ensuring zero disruption to 300+ existing pipelines

• Design the query layer (OLAP) that makes streaming data instantly queryable

• Build the accessible streaming interface - enabling teams to create pipelines through simple configuration

• Partner with users to understand why they abandon streaming solutions and fix the root causes

• Create educational resources that demystify both Kafka and streaming concepts

Drive platform-wide optimisation

• Analyse usage patterns across both Kafka clusters and streaming pipelines to identify optimisation opportunities

• Build cost transparency dashboards that help teams understand their real-time data expenses

• Design solutions that reduce our infrastructure costs while improving performance

Enable real-time everything

• Work with product teams to unlock use cases currently blocked by platform complexity

• Design patterns for common scenarios - from simple pub/sub to complex event sourcing

• Build the vision for how Wise uses real-time data over the next 2 years

• Create clear migration paths from batch to streaming for critical use cases

Qualifications

What do you need?

We are fully aware that it is uncommon for a candidate to have all skills required and we fully support everyone in learning new skills with us. So if you have some of those listed below and are eager to learn more we do want to hear from you!

• You have 4+ years as a technical product manager, ideally with experience in data platforms or infrastructure products

• You understand distributed systems and are excited to learn both Kafka and streaming technologies by getting hands-on

• You have loads of hands‑on experience with data analysis tools (Python/SQL/pandas, Jupyter notebooks) and can independently analyse large datasets

• You can empathise with users struggling with complex infrastructure and design intuitive solutions

• You excel at simplifying complexity - whether it's Kafka's partitioning or Flink's windowing concepts

• You have a track record of driving adoption of technical platforms through great user experience

• You're comfortable learning by doing - you'll create your own Kafka topics and build streaming pipelines

Nice to have:

• Experience with Apache Kafka, including clusters, topics, and consumer groups

• Knowledge of stream processing technologies (Flink, Kafka Streams, Spark)

• Background in developer platforms or infrastructure products

• Experience with event‑driven architectures

• Understanding of financial services real‑time requirements

Additional Information

What do we offer:

• Starting salary: £88,000-£118,000 + RSUs

• Wise Benefits

Interested? Find out more:

• The Wise Tech Stack, 2025 Edition

• Our Application Security Journey

• Platform Engineering KPIs

• Internal Platform as a Product at Wise

• Wise Engineering – https://medium.com/wise-engineering

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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