Sr Engineer Lead - Cloud Foundations

We are looking for a highly technical Engineering Lead to own our Cloud Foundations domain - the platform that enables safe, scalable, and frictionless cloud usage across Wise.

Cloud Foundations provides the “paved path with guardrails” for engineering teams: making it easy to deploy infrastructure while ensuring strong security, governance, and compliance by default.

You will define and evolve how cloud environments are provisioned, accessed, and governed across Wise - primarily in AWS today, with increasing adoption of GCP and other cloud and SaaS providers over time.

As Wise continues to evolve its infrastructure strategy, Cloud Foundations is driving toward a more cloud-agnostic platform model for core compute, storage, and networking capabilities. Our goal is to reduce tight coupling to any single provider API and enable portability, resilience, and strategic flexibility across diverse cloud environments.

You’ll lead a senior-heavy team of 5 engineers, owning critical platform services such as managed cloud accounts, infrastructure deployment tooling, workload access patterns, and shared infrastructure primitives.

This is a high-impact role where your work will shape how hundreds of engineers build in the cloud.

How we work

At Wise, we optimise for autonomy with accountability.

Cloud Foundations sits at the intersection of platform engineering, security, governance, and developer experience. Our goal is to enable teams to move quickly while staying within strong, automated guardrails.

We believe the best solutions come from diverse perspectives and inclusive teams. As an Engineering Lead, you’ll create an environment where engineers feel safe to contribute ideas, challenge decisions, and grow.

What will you be working on?

Cloud Foundations Platform Leadership

Define the technical vision and lead the evolution of Wise’s Cloud Foundations platform, balancing developer experience, governance, scalability, and operational resilience across multiple cloud providers.

Multi-Cloud Strategy & Platform Evolution

Help drive Wise’s long-term cloud strategy toward greater cloud portability and reduced provider lock-in for core infrastructure capabilities. Shape platform abstractions and operating models that support diverse cloud providers and SaaS ecosystems.

Cloud Governance & Automated Guardrails

Design and implement governance that is built-in, not bolted on. Establish secure-by-default patterns, policy enforcement, and automated controls that enable teams to move safely at scale.

Developer Experience & Enablement

Enable teams to deploy infrastructure safely and independently through self-service tooling, paved paths, reusable infrastructure primitives, and excellent platform ergonomics.

Access, Identity & Zero Trust

Own workload and infrastructure access patterns, helping evolve Wise’s identity, authentication, and authorization models toward modern zero-trust principles.

Shared Infrastructure Services

Oversee shared infrastructure primitives including networking, compute foundations, storage patterns, deployment tooling, and cloud account lifecycle management.

Strategic Execution & Operating Model Evolution

Translate strategic initiatives into actionable engineering plans and measurable OKRs. Drive platform adoption, maturity improvements, and organizational alignment across engineering and security stakeholders.

Do you have experience in Usability?, Leadership & Communication

• Experience leading, mentoring, or growing engineers and technical teams
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills
• Ability to influence technical direction across teams and present progress clearly to both engineering and business stakeholders

Cloud & Platform Engineering Experience

• Strong hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS preferred)
• Experience working across multiple cloud providers, including at least one non-hyperscaler environment
• Experience working on cloud platform or infrastructure platform teams
• Understanding of the tradeoffs and strategic importance of cloud-agnostic architectures
• Experience supporting or delivering cloud migration or cloud transformation initiatives

Infrastructure & Automation

• Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code and platform automation
• Hands-on knowledge of Terraform and related tooling ecosystems
• Familiarity with policy-as-code approaches and governance automation

Security, Governance & Risk

• Strong understanding of cloud security, governance, and compliance principles
• Familiarity with zero-trust architectures, IAM, and workload identity patterns
• Ability to balance usability, flexibility, security, and operational control
• Experience operating in regulated or high-compliance environments is a plus

Strategic & Systems Thinking

• Systems-thinking mindset with the ability to navigate ambiguity and organizational complexity
• Experience defining OKRs, platform metrics, KPIs, or cloud maturity indicators
• Ability to turn high-level strategy into pragmatic execution plans

Skills that will help you succeed in this role

• Cloud Strategy Execution
• Governance & Standardization
• Operating Model Evolution
• Systems Thinking
• Platform Engineering
• Metrics & KPIs
• Cloud Security
• Risk Management
• Ambiguity Management
• Stakeholder Influence

Nice to have

• Experience in regulated environments
• Familiarity with policy-as-code tools
• Experience with access tooling such as Teleport
• Experience building internal developer platforms
• Experience designing multi-cloud or cloud-portable infrastructure architectures