Engineering Lead II - Database - Platform

About the team:  Database Reliability Engineering 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. Database Reliability Engineering is at the core and provides databases as service for the rest of the business, working with the Database Platform team to manage our vast estate of database technologies and solutions. As an Engineering Lead in the wider Platform tribe and Engineering organisation, you will have an opportunity to directly affect database technologies and automation strategy, scalability and reliability, building production systems that are ultimately making things better for all customers.

What you will be working on?

• You will be responsible for the well-being of the team, coaching, mentoring and growing a high-performing team in bringing value by working on high-impact solutions.

• You will support the team with occasional hands-on involvement as a software engineer and systems operator, bringing senior engineering expertise into building solutions.

• You’ll be collaborating with other leads, engineers, product managers in the wider organisation.

• Exactly what you’ll be doing day to day will vary, as our team looks at the big picture challenges we see across all of analytics, engineering and business!

What will you be working on?

• 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.

• You’re an excellent communicator, engaging effectively with cross-functional teams to achieve goals, and are capable of presenting to the wider organisation when necessary.

• You're comfortable taking ownership of vendor negotiations and explaining costs to the business

What do you need?

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

• You have expertise in leveraging cloud services from providers like AWS or GCP, and have used your platform engineering skills to develop robust, scalable, and efficient infrastructure.

• You have strong knowledge of SQL and/or NoSQL database technologies and have a comprehensive understanding of key concepts such as high availability, scalability, and security.

• You will not settle for unexplained downtime and outages and do not want to solve the same problems repeatedly.

• You have the experience of creating a culture of operational excellence. 

• You have knowledge of and/or experience in leading a service reliability engineering team.

Nice to Have:

• 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.

• Experience with configuration management (Ansible, Packer), CI/CD (GitHub Actions), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), containers (Docker), container and job orchestration (Kubernetes).

• Experience of workflow orchestration solutions such as Temporal, Cadence, or AWS step functions would be a major bonus.

• Customer is at the heart of everything you do and this empathy drives all decisions you make.

• Ability to articulate complex and technical concepts to non-technical audiences.

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

• Be a customer of Wise.

Interested? Find out more:

• How we work – a practical guide

• DEI @ Wise

• Wise Tech Stack (2025 update)

• See what it's like to work at Wise London!

• Our Engineering career map

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

What do we offer: 

• Starting salary:  £125,000 - £153,000 + RSU

• Wise Benefits

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