Sr Engineering Team Lead - Database - Platform (London)

Job Description

hackajob is collaborating with Wise to connect them with exceptional professionals for this role.

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Company Description

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Wise is a global technology company, building the best way to move and manage the world’s money.
\nMin fees. Max ease. Full speed.

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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.

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As part of our team, you will be helping us create an entirely new network for the world's money.
\nFor everyone, everywhere.

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More about our mission and what we offer.

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Job Description

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About the team: Database Platform 

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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.

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What you will be working on?

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• \nYou 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.\n

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

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

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• \nExactly 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!\n

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What will you be working on?

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• \nYou are a strong leader, experienced in problem-solving and guiding engineering teams through the complexities of project delivery using both agile and traditional methodologies.\n

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

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• \nYou're comfortable taking ownership of vendor negotiations and explaining costs to the business\n

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What do you need?

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• \nYou 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.\n

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• \nYou 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.\n

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• \nYou 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.\n

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

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• \nYou have the experience of creating a culture of operational excellence. \n

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

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Nice to Have:

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• \nPassionate about technology and its relationship with product and user experience.\n

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• \nYou 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.\n

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

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

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

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• \nAbility to articulate complex and technical concepts to non-technical audiences.\n

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• \nKnowledge/interest in payment platforms, foreign exchange & highly complex systems.\n

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• \nBe a customer of Wise.\n

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Interested? Find out more:

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• \nHow we work – a practical guide\n

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• \nDEI @ Wise\n

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• \nWise Tech Stack (2025 update)\n

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• \nSee what it's like to work at Wise London!\n

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• \nOur Engineering career map\n

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• \nWise Engineering –

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What do we offer: 

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• \nStarting salary: £135,000 - £175,000 + RSU\n

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• \nWise Benefits\n

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#LI-AB3 #LI-Hybrid

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Additional Information

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For everyone, everywhere. We're people building money without borders — without judgement or prejudice, too. We believe teams are strongest when they are diverse, equitable and inclusive.

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We're proud to have a truly international team, and we celebrate our differences.
\nInclusive teams help us live our values and make sure every Wiser feels respected, empowered to contribute towards our mission and able to progress in their careers.

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If you want to find out more about what it's like to work at Wise visit Wise.Jobs.

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Keep up to date with life at Wise by following us on LinkedIn and Instagram.