Senior Staff Software Engineer

Wise; Greater London; On-site; GBP 145,000 - 182,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Wise Benefits

Job summary

Wise London is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer (IC5) for the Consumer Onboarding team 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.

You will own fundamental components, collaborate across teams, and define long-term technical strategy for onboarding, balancing speed, scale, and reliability while delivering a great user experience.

Qualifications

• Deep Backend Expertise: Solid, production-proven experience with Java (or similar OOP languages) and modern (micro)service architectures.
• Distributed systems knowledge: Experience building and scaling distributed, high-throughput systems.
• Advanced architecture skills: Designing fundamental components, shared libraries, or core infrastructure.
• Technical leadership: Ability to set technical vision and mentor engineers.
• Product & customer mindset: Understand how tech decisions affect users.
• Strong communication: Explain complex concepts clearly across teams.

Responsibilities

• Scalable Onboarding Architecture: Design systems to support rapid growth without sacrificing speed or reliability.
• Cross-Team Technical Alignment: Define technical contracts and integration points between Onboarding and other Wise teams.
• End-to-End Journey Ownership: Build onboarding flows from account creation to first successful transfer.
• System Health & Performance: Improve maintainability, latency, and cost efficiency of onboarding systems.

Skills

Backend Java

Distributed systems

Architecture

Technical leadership

Product mindset

Communication

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 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.

Job Description

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.

Qualifications

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

Additional Information

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: 145,000 - 182,000 + RSUs

• Wise Benefits

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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