# Senior ML Engineering Team Lead - Financial Crime **Company**: Wise **Location**: London, England **Work arrangement**: hybrid **Experience**: senior **Job type**: full-time **Salary**: £135,000 - £175,000 **Category**: Engineering **Industry**: Technology **Apply**: https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/Wise/744000158702800-senior-ml-engineering-team-lead-financial-crime?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply **Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/job/senior-ml-engineering-team-lead-financial-crime-8604364c-b8d/ ## Description Wise is a global technology company, building the best way to move and manage the world’s money. Min fees. Max ease. Full speed. Whether people and businesses are sending money to another country, spending abroad, or making and receiving international payments, Wise is on a mission to make their lives easier and save them money. As part of our team, you will be helping us create an entirely new network for the world's money. For everyone, everywhere. Wise protects millions of customers and billions in transactions from fraud, money laundering and financial crime. Our ML systems are the front line of defense - operating at a global scale of 100K requests/minute under strict sub-50ms latency SLAs. We need an exceptional technical leader to own how these models are engineered, shipped and scaled. We're hiring a Senior ML Engineering Lead to build and grow Wise's Risk Modelling engineering pillar. You will own the full model lifecycle standard for financial crime detection - from offline experimentation to production deployment and real-time monitoring and build the team to execute it. Your job is to build the automated engineering ecosystem and organisation that scales this safely to hundreds of models. This is a rare greenfield leadership role with strong investment and engagement from Wise's CTO and senior leadership. **Responsibilities** - The Model Factory: Architect the declarative pipeline that turns a configuration file into a deployed, monitored model - the engineering backbone for scaling to hundreds of models - The Experimentation Engine: Establish the reusable path from research (partnering with DS Research) to high-throughput production for traditional and modern architectures - Model Operations: Build the infrastructure for automated retraining, drift detection, threshold simulation/management and audit trails - the operational layer required to run hundreds of models safely at scale - The Team: Recruit, lead and mentor a world-class team of ML engineers. Establish a high-performance, engineering-first culture from scratch - setting hiring standards, technical bar and growth paths - Cross-Platform Partnership: Define and navigate the partnership with key platform teams - owning the build vs consume decisions for your pillar **Requirements** - You've explicitly led or built an ML Engineering or model lifecycle automation team (not just used one) at a high-growth company - you defined the standards that other engineering teams followed - System-level and mathematical depth: you can design a model factory architecture, review a training pipeline & debug a runtime inference latency regression - Experience in high-throughput environments where latency constraints are tight and model failures carry massive financial consequences - Track record of hiring and developing senior engineers - you've built a team, not just inherited one - Ability to navigate ambiguity and make architecture-level decisions with incomplete information - this is a greenfield build, not an optimisation role - Strong enough technically to guide and review across deep learning, ML systems and production infrastructure - you lead through depth, not just delegation **Nice to Have** - Experience at a tier-1 fintech or payments company - Experience with graph-based methods (GNNs, entity resolution) in production - Foundation model fine-tuning or LLM evaluation experience - Experience establishing ML engineering practices in organisations transitioning from classical ML to deep learning **What we offer** - Starting salary: £135,000 - £175,000 + RSUs - Wise Benefits For more fresh new jobs, check out [yubhub.co](https://yubhub.co/). ## Skills ### Required - ML Engineering - model lifecycle automation - high-throughput environments - deep learning - ML systems - production infrastructure ### Nice to have - graph-based methods - GNNs - entity resolution - foundation model fine-tuning - LLM evaluation --- Source: [Apply at jobs.smartrecruiters.com](https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/Wise/744000158702800-senior-ml-engineering-team-lead-financial-crime?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)