Senior Software Engineer I - Risk Control & Governance

Wise; Greater London; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Wise is seeking a Senior Product Engineer to join the Risk & Control Governance team. You will build governance, assurance, and data foundations ensuring risk decisions are consistent, explainable, auditable, and monitored at scale.

This role sits at the crossroads of the Risk API platform, Product, and FinCrime teams, delivering scalable systems that foster trust and enable regulatory evidence generation across the platform.

Qualifications

• Experience building high-throughput data-intensive systems.
• Experience with data quality frameworks, pipelines, or lineage tracking.
• Ability to reason about distributed systems and design robust, operable solutions.
• Proven ownership and ability to drive delivery with limited direction.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration with Risk API, Product, and FinCrime teams.

Responsibilities

• Build Data Trust: implement data quality monitoring, contracts, and lineage tracking for traceability from risk decisions to source data.
• Deliver Continuous Assurance: design automated monitoring to detect drift, false positives/negatives, and coverage gaps.
• Enable Auditability: create audit trails and explainability tooling for regulatory reporting and evidence generation.
• Integrate with Risk API: work with the Risk API team to embed governance across the core platform.

Skills

Backend engineering

Kafka

SQL

NoSQL databases

Data governance

Ownership

Tools

Java

Kafka

SQL

NoSQL databases

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.

Job Description

More about our mission and what we offer.

Job Description

We're looking for an experienced Senior Product Engineer to join the Risk & Control Governance team / Risk Assessment Group. You'll be instrumental in building the governance, assurance, and data foundations that ensure every risk decision at Wise is consistent, explainable, auditable, and continuously monitored.

This role works at the intersection of the Risk API platform, Product, and Financial Crime (FinCrime) teams — offering a unique opportunity to build the systems that give Wise confidence in every risk assessment it operates at scale.

You will be the driving force behind the platform's trustworthiness and integrity, focusing on:

• Data Governance: Building and maintaining data ownership, lineage, and quality monitoring systems that ensure every risk decision is powered by trusted data.
• Control Assurance: Designing continuous monitoring and validation systems that verify controls perform as intended — including trigger validation, drift detection, coverage analysis, and control health scoring.
• Auditability & Explainability: Implementing end-to-end audit trails, change history tracking, and explainability tooling that enables one-click regulatory evidence generation.
• Scalable Solutions: Designing robust, high-throughput solutions that handle large volumes of data and can be quickly understood and scaled across multiple distinct risk domains.

What will you be working on?

You will join the team at a pivotal moment, with your contributions being immediately visible and critical to the success of the entire Risk Assessment platform's governance layer.

The core challenge for the team — and your immediate focus — is to build the assurance and governance foundations that the platform currently lacks, ensuring every control can answer: Was the right trigger used? Was the right data available? Was the right decision made? Is the control still effective?

Your Immediate Impact Will Be To:

• Build Data Trust: Implement data quality monitoring, data contracts, and lineage tracking that give the organisation full traceability from risk decisions back to source data.
• Deliver Continuous Assurance: Design and build automated monitoring systems that continuously validate control effectiveness — detecting drift, false positives/negatives, and coverage gaps before they become incidents.
• Enable Auditability: Create audit trail infrastructure and explainability tooling that dramatically reduces the effort required for regulatory reporting and compliance evidence generation.
• Integrate with Risk API: Work closely with the Risk API team to embed governance and assurance capabilities into the core platform, ensuring clean integration points and shared data contracts.

Qualifications

What do you need?

• Strong Backend Engineering: Proven experience building high-throughput, data-intensive systems in Java. Hands-on expertise with Kafka, SQL and NoSQL databases, and designing for scale and reliability.
• Data Engineering Aptitude: Experience with data quality frameworks, pipeline orchestration, or lineage tracking. You understand what it takes to make data trustworthy at scale.
• Systems Thinking: Ability to reason about complex distributed systems, identify failure modes, and design solutions that are both robust and operationally simple.
• Ownership & Autonomy: Comfortable operating with ambiguity, defining your own work from high-level objectives, and driving delivery end-to-end without close direction.
• Collaborative Mindset: Ability to work effectively across team boundaries — particularly with the Risk API team, Product, and FinCrime stakeholders — to align on contracts, data models, and integration patterns.

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.

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.