Senior Staff Software Engineer

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