Senior Software Developer II - Wise for Banks

Wise; Greater London; On-site; GBP 111,000 - 145,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Wise Benefits

Starting salary: £111,000 - £145,000 +

Job summary

Wise is recruiting a senior backend engineer to own critical payment backends, collaborating with product managers and other engineers to deliver robust, observable services in production. You will shape approaches, make tradeoffs, and drive reliability across the system.

You will deepen knowledge of funding, settlement and currency conversion, while expanding ownership and contributing to Wise’s engineering culture and product impact in a fast-growing organization.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience building or making substantial contributions to large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong backend engineering experience, including relational databases, event-driven systems and proficiency in an object-oriented language.
• A product mindset: you can explain the customer problems behind your work, why your solution matters and how you assess whether it helps.
• The ability to take ownership with a high degree of autonomy, make progress through ambiguity and involve others when their expertise is needed.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills. You can explain technical decisions, work effectively across teams and contribute to your colleagues’ success.
• Curiosity about the business domain and a willingness to learn how our partners use the products you build.

Responsibilities

• Own solutions from problem to production. Work with product managers and engineers to understand partner needs, shape the approach, and design, build, test and operate backend services.
• Make thoughtful technical decisions. Explain tradeoffs clearly and balance delivery time, reliability and maintainability, including when the information available is incomplete.
• Build across system boundaries. Work with other teams to agree clear interfaces and understand how changes affect the wider payment journey.
• Improve the systems you operate. Strengthen testing and observability, diagnose production issues, and use what you learn to make services more dependable.
• Help the team succeed. Contribute across workstreams, share domain knowledge and help other engineers grow through reviews, pairing and mentoring.

Skills

Large-scale distributed systems

Backend engineering

Product mindset

Autonomy

Cross-functional collaboration

Curiosity about business domain

Tools

Java

Spring Boot

Kafka

PostgreSQL

Job description

Company Description

Wise is a global technology company, building the best way to move and manage the world's money.

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.

About The Team

More about our mission and what we offer. Banks need flexibility in how they fund international payments, settle with Wise and convert currencies. Our Cash Management team builds the products that give them that control and make Wise work for more partners and their customers. The problems are concrete. How can a bank lock in an exchange rate today and provide the funds later? How can it send payments first and settle with Wise afterward? We build the capabilities behind those choices, helping partners manage their cash around the needs of their business. We're a small, growing team developing new products in a domain with plenty to learn and shape. You'll have a meaningful say in how we solve customer problems, design our systems and maintain engineering quality as we grow. The work combines product development with the challenge of building dependable services that move money across systems. You'll work closely with product managers, partner banks and engineers across Wise whose systems handle accounts, incoming payments and liquidity. Together, you'll understand partner needs, agree how those systems fit together and turn complex requirements into practical products.

Job Description

About the role

We're looking for a senior engineer who enjoys understanding a customer's problem, designing a solution and taking responsibility for how it performs in production. This is a hands-on role with substantial ownership. You'll have the autonomy to move work forward, alongside colleagues who contribute through shared design, reviews and pairing.

You Will

• Own solutions from problem to production. Work with product managers and engineers to understand partner needs, shape the approach, and design, build, test and operate backend services.
• Make thoughtful technical decisions. Explain tradeoffs clearly and balance delivery time, reliability and maintainability, including when the information available is incomplete.
• Build across system boundaries. Work with other teams to agree clear interfaces and understand how changes affect the wider payment journey.
• Improve the systems you operate. Strengthen testing and observability, diagnose production issues, and use what you learn to make services more dependable.
• Help the team succeed. Contribute across workstreams, share domain knowledge and help other engineers grow through reviews, pairing and mentoring.

Our backend stack includes Java, Spring Boot, Kafka and PostgreSQL. You'll deepen your understanding of funding, settlement and currency conversion, using that knowledge to make better product and engineering decisions. As the team's scope grows, there will be opportunities to take on broader technical ownership and influence how we build.

Qualifications

We're looking for:

• Hands-on experience building or making substantial contributions to large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong backend engineering experience, including relational databases, event-driven systems and proficiency in an object-oriented language.
• A product mindset: you can explain the customer problems behind your work, why your solution matters and how you assess whether it helps.
• The ability to take ownership with a high degree of autonomy, make progress through ambiguity and involve others when their expertise is needed.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills. You can explain technical decisions, work effectively across teams and contribute to your colleagues’ success.
• Curiosity about the business domain and a willingness to learn how our partners use the products you build.

Useful Additional Experience Includes

• Java, Spring Boot, Kafka or PostgreSQL.
• Payments, financial technology, funding, settlement or foreign exchange.
• Using product metrics and data to understand customer behaviour and guide decisions.

You can learn our technologies and banking domain here. If you bring the core engineering experience, ownership and curiosity described above, we'd like to hear from you.

Interested? Find out more:

• How we work – a practical guide
• DEI @ Wise
• Wise Tech Stack (2025 update)
• See what it's like to work at Wise London!
• Our Engineering career map
• Wise Engineering - https://medium.com/wise-engineering

What Do We Offer

• Starting salary: £111,000 - £145,000 + RSUs
• Wise Benefits

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.

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