Senior Software Engineer II - Screening Controls

Location: Global

Team: General

About the Role

Join Wise's Screening team as a Senior Software Engineer II, where you'll build and operate the control framework screening customers, counterparties, and transactions across all products. Prevent onboarding of sanctioned entities, identify PEPs, and detect adverse media risks while ensuring a frictionless customer experience. Collaborate with Compliance and regional teams to implement scalable solutions meeting strict regulatory standards, processing tens of millions of events with sub-second latency, high availability, and privacy-by-design. Design fault-tolerant screening services for real-time and batch flows, lead technical initiatives, mentor engineers, and drive platform integrations for seamless product onboarding. Evolve data models for auditability and partner on rollout plans that balance compliance with efficiency. With 7+ years in Java, Spring, Kafka, and databases, take end-to-end ownership in a global, inclusive environment. Wise offers £105,000-£130,000 + RSUs, flexible working, and a mission-driven culture building money without borders. Contribute to a diverse team advancing financial inclusion worldwide.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and build scalable, fault-tolerant screening services for sanctions, PEP, and adverse media across batch and real-time flows
• Meet product SLOs for latency and availability by implementing strong observability, retry mechanisms, and graceful degradation strategies
• Lead technical initiatives, mentor engineers, and raise engineering standards through reviews, design docs, and measurable reliability and quality improvements
• Drive platform capabilities that let new Wise products integrate “out of the box” with screening
• Partner with Compliance and Regional product teams to define controls, timings, and rollout plans that meet regulatory obligations without unnecessary friction
• Evolve data models and schemas, ensuring auditability and data lineage across event streams and storage
• Collaborate closely with Compliance teams to understand required checks and implementation
• Work with regional and growth teams to support onboarding processes with FinCrime and screening solutions

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of Java 8+ knowledge
• Experience with Spring framework and microservice best practices
• Strong experience with event-driven architectures and asynchronous messaging systems, such as Kafka
• Hands-on experience working with relational and non-relational databases, query optimisations, designing and evolving schemas
• Proven track record of leading technical initiatives and mentoring other engineers
• Great communication skills (both verbal and written) and the ability to articulate complex, technical concepts to non-technical audiences
• Ability to work autonomously on customer problems with end-to-end ownership

Preferred Qualifications

• FinCrime or KYC experience: sanctions, PEP, adverse media, fuzzy matching, risk scoring
• Building low-latency, high-availability systems in regulated environments with strong security, privacy, and audit controls

Required Skills

• Java 8+
• Spring framework
• Microservice best practices
• Event-driven architectures
• Kafka or similar asynchronous messaging
• Relational databases
• Non-relational databases
• Query optimisations
• Schema design and evolution
• Technical leadership and mentoring

Benefits

• RSUs (stock options)
• Flexible working
• Me days and mission days
• Paid sabbatical after 4 years
• Health insurance
• Learning budget
• Company retreats
• Wise card
• Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives

Wise is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse workforce.