Sr Engineering Team Lead - Database - Platform

Wise
London, UK
about 1 month ago

Role details

Contract type
Permanent contract
Employment type
Full-time (> 32 hours)
Experience level
Expert
Experience required
10 years minimum
Compensation
£135,000.0 - £175,000.0
Working hours
Regular working hours

Tech stack

Java (Programming Language) Amazon Web Services Configuration Management Databases Continuous Integration Payment Systems Github Python (Programming Language) NoSQL Reliability Engineering Cloud Services Ansible
+9 more
Standard Sql SQL Databases Google Cloud Cloud Platform System System Availability Kubernetes Software Coding Terraform Docker

Job description

Company 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. More about our mission and what we offer. Job Description About the team: Database Platform 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: £135,000 - £175,000 + RSU Wise Benefits #LI-AB3 #LI-Hybrid Additional Information 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. We’re proud to have a truly international team, and we celebrate our differences. Inclusive 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. If you want to find out more about what it’s like to work at Wise visit Wise.Jobs. Keep up to date with life at Wise by following us on LinkedIn and Instagram. Compensation: GBP 135000 - GBP 175000 - yearly Responsibilities Lead and mentor a high-performing Database Platform team to deliver scalable and reliable production systems. Collaborate with cross-functional leads and product managers to drive automation strategy and manage vendor negotiations.

Requirements

Team Leadership, Database Reliability Engineering, Python, Java, AWS, GCP, SQL, NoSQL, System Design, Platform Engineering, Operational Excellence, Service Reliability Engineering, Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD

Apply for this position

This job is hosted externally. Click below to view the full posting and apply.

Apply on jobs.y-axis.com

Good distractions

Talks and stories from around this role — technically off-topic, practically not.

3:03 min

Career evolution in data engineering and AI platforms

Maria Apazoglou · Coffee With Developers

2:37 min

Comparing traditional SQL tables versus NoSQL non-tabular databases

Stanimira Vlaeva · JS Congress

2:07 min

Inspecting default bridge architectures and custom Docker networks

Oliver Seitz Oliver Seitz · WWC 2025

6:36 min

Funding open source through GitHub Accelerator and Sponsors

Stormy Peters · WWC 2023

1:34 min

Pivoting careers into specialized platform engineering roles

Xavier Portilla Edo · LIVE

3:16 min

Terminology differences between relational and NoSQL databases

Tim Faulkes · LIVE

Videos

See all

Related articles

See all