Engineering Lead - Payout Core

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.

The team you'll be working with: Payout Core Whenever Wise needs to deliver money , whether through a customer transfer, a business payout, or an internal operational flow , the payout domain is responsible to make this happen. It receives a request: "pay this amount to this recipient," and figures out the how: which partner integration to use, considering availability, bank holidays, and operational windows. It then coordinates the execution, handles retries when things go wrong, and provides the delivery time estimates customers see. Every outgoing payment at Wise flows through the systems this team owns.

Payout Core is a newly formed team, dedicated to owning and evolving this domain. We're building the team from the ground up, and we need an Engineering Lead to shape its technical direction, lead its engineers, and drive an ambitious long-term vision: making the payout domain a product-agnostic platform that any team at Wise can use to send money out.

As an Engineering Lead for Payout Core, you will have both tech lead and people manager responsibilities:

• As a tech lead, you will be responsible for the quality of your team's technical solutions, including code quality, architecture, performance, reliability, and adherence to company-wide engineering standards.
• You will own the payout domain's technical roadmap , from evolving the domain's architecture to designing the next generation of smart routing.
• You will make sure the team is building the right product in a scalable, sustainable way.
• This is a hands-on lead role: you will write code, review code, and contribute directly to delivery alongside your team.

• As a people manager, you will be responsible for your team's productivity, goal setting, career path identification, and supporting the engineers in their individual growth.
• You will make sure the team has the right size and mix of people, deciding when to hire and who.
• You will nurture and evolve the team's ways of working as it transitions into an independent, focused unit.

Across both: you will drive the payout domain vision, align stakeholders across the organization, and represent the team in cross-team architectural discussions , both reviewing and producing RFCs for decisions that affect the payout domain.

What we offer you:

• High-impact, high-visibility work: every outgoing payment at Wise flows through the systems this team owns.
• A team of experienced engineers with years of context in the payout domain, motivated to push it forward as a dedicated unit.
• Shape a newly formed team as it becomes an independent unit , with strong existing foundations to build from, define the practices, ways of working, and technical identity of the team, within a culture of empowered teams.
• A long-term vision that's ambitious and still being defined , optimizing how we route payments across partners, building a product-agnostic payout platform , with the space for the team to define how to get there.
• A role that grows with the domain , as the payout platform evolves, so will the team's scope and yours with it.

Qualifications:

• Experience as a tech lead or engineering manager, with a proven track record of guiding and developing engineers, fostering their growth, and building high-performing, autonomous teams.
• Strong product mindset, consistently prioritizing customer needs and making data-driven decisions.
• Excellent communication skills and a collaborative spirit.
• Ability to own and articulate a technical vision and turn it into a concrete roadmap.
• Extensive experience with Java or Kotlin, including proficiency with the Spring framework and understanding of microservice best practices.
• Skilled in working with relational databases, including query optimization and designing robust schemas.
• Strong advocate for best coding practices, enjoy writing testable code, and actively participate in code reviews and open feedback.

Nice to have:

• Experience with payments or financial infrastructure.
• Experience building highly reliable and highly available systems in high-traffic environments.