Wise are hiring an Engineering Lead (MEA)

Wise is one of the fastest-growing companies in Europe and we’re on a mission: to make money without borders the new normal. We’ve got 13 million customers across the globe 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 whole new way to do it.

And, we need a talented Engineering Tech Lead to join our mission.

The team you’ll be working with: MEA

Your team is part of the Emerging Currencies squad and the Regional Expansion tribe.

The Fintech market in the Middle East and Africa is expected to hit $3.45 billion by 2026 and regulators have just begun to implement policies to encourage growth.

Open banking, digital wallets, cryptocurrency and APIs are reshaping the region’s financial infrastructure. But when you try to send, receive, spend or invest between different currencies the cracks start to appear. It’s slow and expensive, and not transparent.

Our team has a huge opportunity to make a difference in the region by helping people and businesses save time and money. You’ll own some of the biggest remittance corridors in the world and you’ll be responsible for enabling all of Wise’s products in MEA. It’s a recently assembled team, with a mix of new joiners and senior engineers, with a clear and impactful roadmap.

You will be involved in the development cycle and lead from the front. Most of our leads spend 30 to 50% of their time coding. You and your team will plan autonomously and decide what to take on and how things should be done. The only ask is that your goals are aligned with our mission, ambitious and achievable. You’ll get coaching from your manager as you grow into a leader here.

What kind of work does the team do?

Our team works closely with local partners and government institutions to bring Wise’s mission to the region.

We integrate with local payment systems to reduce transfers from days to seconds. We implement AML and KYC requirements to help fight financial crime, while making things convenient for our customers.

We modify Wise’s internal systems to accommodate regional requirements. Those modifications are done with scale in mind, making sure we allow other regions to benefit from the extension/modification.

Your role in the team:

• You’ll be responsible for the overall health and productivity of the engineers within your team. You will help your engineers grow.
• Drive the team to take ambitious, yet achievable goals
• You will lead from the front. When needed you will implement some of the features planned by your team
• You’ll review designs and pull requests providing feedback and helping teams make decisions
• When a project is blocked you will intervene by either mentoring/coaching your engineers to overcome the obstacle or by removing the blocker yourself
• You’ll have an overview of what’s happening across the tribe and seize opportunities to build solutions that can be reused by other teams

Is this you?

• Experience leading, coaching and mentoring driven and high performing teams
• Able to communicate technical concepts in simple terms to different audiences
• A passion for international finance, foreign exchange and payment systems
• Comfortable working on big challenges and taking full ownership of the customer journey
• Experience building and designing scalable and performing systems (preferably within the Java ecosystem)
• Experience working with microservices and asynchronous message queues
• Comfortable with SQL databases, optimisation and transaction

…but don’t worry we don’t expect you to know everything!

Nice to have bonuses:

• Experience with Java and Spring framework
• Experience in the MEA market (or other developing market)

What does success look like in this role?

• Your team is committed and motivated to fulfil the agreed objectives
• You take full ownership of problems that are identified making sure they are solved
• You keep stakeholders informed with well written updates. You can do this for internal and external audiences
• You can challenge our partners when their SLAs are not met; you can do it while keeping a good relationship
• You’ll understand our customers and the impact that our product makes in their lives
• You’ll make contributions to the wider engineering goals of the regional tribe
• You and your team are recognised in the organisation because of following good engineering practices
• Your team knows how to get unblocked

What we offer:

• The opportunity to have a real impact
• The ability to choose your path to success – you’ll have the freedom to define the vision, goals and processes for your team
• Constant interesting challenges in a fast growing company where you will have the chance to step up your game
• A position where your growth is our priority. You will have lead training (in house)  and weekly coaching sessions with your manager
• A fun work environment with social activities and events

Find out more about our benefits in our London office.

Interested? Find out more:

• 👀 How we work - a practical guide

• 📹 Wise Vlogs: Omar, Engineering Lead

• 💻 The Wise Tech Stack, 2020 edition

• 📈 Our Engineering career map

• 🚀 Engineering career journeys at Wise

We’re people without borders — without judgement or prejudice, too. We want to work with the best people, no matter their background. So if you’re passionate about learning new things and keen to join our mission, you’ll fit right in.

Also, qualifications aren’t that important to us. If you’ve got great experience, and you’re great at articulating your thinking, we’d like to hear from you.

And because we believe that diverse teams build better products, we’d especially love to hear from you if you’re from an under-represented demographic.