Job Description
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 new one.
And, we need a talented Engineering Tech Lead to join our mission.
The team you’ll be working with: Hispanic LatAm
Your team is part of the Emerging Currencies squad and the Regional Expansion tribe.
Latin America is going through a transformation that is improving the way people interact with money.
Fintech success stories in developed markets like open banking, faster payment schemes and QR payments are becoming a reality in Latin America. This is being driven by new regulations and improvements in local payment systems.
But once you try to send, receive, spend or invest between different currencies or countries the cracks start to appear: it is slow and expensive, and the cost is not transparent.
With this quickly evolving landscape, our team has a unique opportunity to make a difference in the region by helping people and businesses to save time and money. The opportunity is huge: you will own some of the biggest remittance corridors in the world and you will be responsible for enabling all of Wise’s products in Hispanic Latam.
You will join a group of engineers in a recently assembled team that has a good mix of new joiners and region veterans (previously focused on the Brazilian market). They have a clear and impactful roadmap.
You will spend most of your time making sure the team is motivated and engaged in delivering ambitious projects, guiding them to have the biggest impact they can have and making sure they grow in their career.
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 and how things should be done; the only requirement is that your goals are aligned with our mission, and are ambitious and achievable. Your manager will work closely with you to guide you in your first few months and then coach you to grow as a leader within Wise.
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 and 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
- Work in close relationship with the Product Manager to achieve the team’s vision
- Drive the team to take ambitious, yet achievable, goals
- You will lead from the front implementing some of the features planned by your team
- You’ll regularly review designs and pull requests from engineers in your team
- When a project is blocked you will intervene by either mentoring/coaching your engineers to overcome the obstacle or by removing the blocker yourself
- Manage partner relationships
- You’ll make sure your team’s services are highly available and scalable
- You will coach engineers in your team and help them set and achieve their career goals.
- Contribute to improvements at the squad level by collaborating with other leads and teams
- 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 that 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
Nice to have bonuses:
- Experience with Java and Spring framework
- Knowledge of Spanish
- Experience in the Latin American 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 are a regular contributor to our codebase
- You and your team are recognised in the organisation because of following good engineering practices
- Your team knows how to get unblocked
What you get back: