Engineering Lead - Connect

Requirements

• Experience leading and managing engineering teams (typically 3–8+), including mentoring and performance support
• Strong stakeholder management: comfortable influencing priorities across teams and aligning on technical direction
• Ability to balance customer outcomes, reliability, and engineering sustainability
• Experience building and operating software-based L4/L7 proxies (e.g. Envoy, Nginx, Apache)
• Knowledge of service-to-service communication concerns: routing, retries/timeouts, load balancing, rate limiting, and observability
• Strong troubleshooting skills across systems and networking (Linux command line, logs/metrics/traces)
• Experience operating microservices in a containerised environment, ideally Kubernetes
• Familiarity with service mesh architectures (e.g. Istio/Linkerd concepts), including HTTP routing, identity, and traffic management patterns
• Broad design and operational experience on public cloud (ideally AWS)
• Strong passion for automation: building and testing tooling that reduces operational toil and improves safety and consistency

What You'll Be Doing

• Own the vision and execution for Wise’s connectivity layer
• Evolve service mesh capabilities and drive reliable adoption patterns
• Improve ingress platforms ensuring secure, observable, high-performance access
• Build and operate highly reliable L4/L7 proxy infrastructure
• Create automation, templates, tooling, and documentation for product teams
• Partner with security teams to implement defence-in-depth
• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of engineers
• Own business-critical systems with a pragmatic approach to operations

Nice to Have

• eBPF-based packet filtering and tooling experience
• Familiarity with transport layer security and certificate management
• Experience with Cilium / Network Policies
• Exposure to security best practices and standards
• Interest in international finance, foreign exchange, and payment systems

Perks and Benefits

• You’re building and maintaining one of the core foundation layers of Wise’s platform
• Product teams can ship faster due to dependable platforms
• Reliability improves over time with clearer SLOs and faster recovery
• Driving a roadmap that aligns to Wise’s mission and values
• Growing a strong team culture with high trust and healthy operational ownership