Developer jobs in South Africa

Wise is one the fastest growing companies in Europe and we’re on a mission: to make money without borders the new normal. We transferred over £118 billion in the Financial Year 2024 alone, and we’re growing. Fast.

Current banking systems don’t let us send, spend or receive money across borders easily. Or quickly. Or cheaply.

So, we’re building a new one. More about our mission and what we offer.

We need a Software Engineer to join our mission and help us build a global platform that’s scalable, reliable and secure. You’ll dive right into projects helping to develop our internal database platform, automation and tooling, used to provision and manage hundreds of databases deployed across multiple environments.

We are looking for a Software Engineer with a background in Python development and platform engineering experience to join our Database Platform team. Database Platform provides databases as service for the rest of the business, managing our vast estate of database technologies and solutions. As a Software Engineer in the wider Platform tribe and Engineering organisation, you will have an opportunity to directly affect our database platform and automation strategy, scalability and reliability, building production systems that are ultimately making things better for all customers.

We operate on a strong belief in automation, programmatic implementation, and reusable design. We’re looking for people who can step back and think holistically about the ecosystem, but also follow through and help implement the design; drawing on the resources across the rest of the Platform tribe. As we scale our database platform, we need to sustain this growth by continuously iterating on the services we run, with a focus on availability, security, and ease of use. We’re looking for an engineer with strong platform engineering experience who can analyse complex requirements and deliver simple solutions to help our teams achieve our mission with speed and confidence.

As an international Financial Services company, we also have the responsibility to keep our customers’ money and data safe. The Database Platform team plays a critical role in this by helping our Platform and Product Engineers work with Databases safely and ensure that best practices are always applied. To do this we work closely with the other teams building out the Data Platform, and with the wider Platform organisation to build out the required guardrails.

• You will join our Database Platform team, and contribute to delivering our cloud-based database platform used internally by our development teams to provision and manage their database deployments.
• You’ll develop self-service tooling to enhance the developer experience, build guardrails to abstract the complexity of operating database services, as well as automate routine tasks.
• You’re production environment oriented, and won’t settle at all for downtime and outages.
• You have the ability to work independently and plan your own solutions to problems.

• Strong development skills in Python (or other programming language).
• A solid understanding of core software engineering principles with the capability to write, review and refactor code, ensuring it’s secure and meets standards for quality, testing, and documentation.
• Proven experience in designing and developing resilient web APIs using frameworks such as Flask, Django, or Fast API.
• Proficiency in operating within a Cloud-based environment and working with Cloud APIs (preferably AWS).
• Working knowledge of configuration management and orchestration tools (e.g. Terraform, Ansible, SaltStack, etc).
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to effectively convey new processes and workflows and collaborate with diverse teams across the organisation.

• Platform engineering experience with a focus on building internal developer platforms, tooling, and infrastructure automation.
• Experience building database-as-a-service platforms or similar internal platforms.
• Familiarity with database technologies at scale (e.g MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, etc) would be a distinct advantage.
• Familiarity with workflow engines (e.g. Temporal, Cadence).
• Front end development experience.

• Experience with distributed database technologies such as YugabyteDB or similar solutions (CockroachDB, TiDB, etc).

Interested? Find out more:

• How we work – a practical guide
• DEI @ Wise
• Wise Tech Stack (2025 update)
• Our Engineering career map
• Scaling our Infrastructure; how we make it work
• Wise Engineering - https://medium.com/wise-engineering

What do we offer:

• Starting salary: £65,000 - £85,000
• 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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