Engineering Lead I - Machine Learning Platform

Job Description

Enter: our Machine Learning Platform team!

For our customers, using Wise is as simple as sending money from A to B. Yet behind our app and website is a complex engine of currencies, routes, products and features, generating terabytes of data each day. The Data services offered by the Data Platform is at the core of systems that store, process and leverage this data, ultimately providing real time insights that serve as one of many drivers for business growth.

Your mission and role will be to lead the team building and maintaining a cost efficient and scalable machine learning platform, that is convenient to use and that provides a good engineering and data science experience. Your input will directly affect how Wise is making decisions and predictions on billions of events.

How we work

We operate with a 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 grow, it is imperative to protect our customers’ money and navigate complex regulatory requirements world-wide. You will have a focus on running and maintaining the data services, making sure we have the right observability and service management elements in place, with an eye for high-availability, assessing and reducing engineering load and devising more effective ways for the team to look after its cloud-based 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 relevant experience who can understand and respond to complex requirements and deliver simple solutions to help our teams achieve our mission with speed and confidence. 

What does it take?

1. You are a strong leader, experienced in problem-solving and guiding engineering teams through the complexities of project delivery using both agile and traditional methodologies.

2. Comfortable taking ownership of vendor negotiations and explaining costs to the business

3. Great communication skills and the ability to build consensus - you’re comfortable making a case for what you believe we should be doing

4. Experience being a self-starter, self-motivated and collaborative

5. Willingness to give and take regular feedback - regular feedback is part of our culture

What do you need?

We are fully aware that it is uncommon for a candidate to have all skills required and we fully support everyone in learning new skills with us. We value potential and enthusiasm as much as existing expertise.  So if you have some of those listed below and are eager to learn more we do want to hear from you!

• You have a solid background in software engineering, ideally within the Python or Java ecosystems, upholding high coding standards and a thorough understanding of system design and engineering principles.

• Understanding of test coverage best practices & the test pyramid concept, and you are well versed in writing effective, scalable and clean code

• You have experience designing and implementing distributed and concurrent systems, knowing the tradeoffs between stateful/stateless and synchronous/asynchronous architectures

• You have ability to take initiative while working collaboratively - identify problems, empathise with stakeholders and collaborators, create plans and implement solutions

• You are a great communicator with the ability to clearly relay your plans back to the team, mentor junior engineers and seek out feedback for yourself

• The customer is at the heart of everything you do and this empathy drives the decisions you make

Nice to haves:

• Passionate about technology and its relationship with product and user experience

• You are a security and privacy advocate, understanding concepts such as principle of least privilege, and are able to apply basic security principles at infrastructure and application level.

• You have knowledge of cloud based ML solutions from GCP or AWS

• Experience with streaming data processing frameworks such as Flink, Beam, Spark, Kafka Streams

• Experience with Ansible, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Infrastructure as Code, AWS or other cloud ecosystems

• Knowledge/interest in payment platforms, foreign exchange & complex systems architecture

• Be a customer of Wise

What you get back:

• The opportunity to create meaningful change for our customers and team

• Loads of development opportunities

• Work with a team of passionate Machine Learning Engineers who love improving the lives of our fellow Wisers

• A fun work environment with social activities and events

And more… Check out our offer here.

Interested? Find out more:

• The Wise Tech Stack, 2025 Edition

• Scaling our Infrastructure; how we make it work

• Wise Engineering – https://medium.com/wise-engineering

What do we offer: 

• Starting salary: £100,000-125,000 + RSU

• Wise Benefits

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.

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.