Wise is looking for a Backend Engineer to join our North America Risk team, focused on protecting customers and the business from financial crime. You will design and build real-time risk and fraud prevention systems that handle billions in transaction volume, with a focus on optimizing for latency and user experience.
What You'll Do
- Design technical solutions that optimize for throughput and speed, keeping p99 end-to-end latency under 1 second for real-time risk & fraud checks.
- Own the risk infrastructure for unique features like Instant ACH in the US market.
- Take end-to-end ownership of projects from initial idea to monitoring in production.
- Collaborate daily with Data Scientists to put models into production and with Data Analysts to refine rule sets.
- Help raise the automation level of the platform to handle new risk types like Sanctions screening and AML in the US and Canada.
- Contribute to a culture of 'you build it, you run it,' ensuring real-time monitoring systems are robust and reliable.
What We're Looking For
- 7+ years of experience with Java, Kotlin, or other JVM-based languages.
- Deep knowledge of the Spring framework.
- Deep understanding of JDBC, database internals, and query optimization.
- Hands-on experience with Kafka, Kafka Streams, or Apache Flink for real-time event processing.
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines and designing scalable, resilient distributed systems.
- Ability to articulate complex technical concepts to non-technical audiences.
- Comfort working daily with Data Scientists and Data Analysts.
Nice to Have
- Familiarity with machine learning basics: data pipelines, feature engineering, precision/recall.
- Experience with OLAP databases or data lakes (like Apache Iceberg) with Kafka ingestion.
Technical Stack
- Languages: Java, Kotlin, JVM
- Frameworks: Spring
- Data: JDBC
- Streaming: Kafka, Kafka Streams, Apache Flink
Team & Environment
You will be part of the North America Risk team, distributed across Budapest and Austin.
Work Mode
This is a hybrid position based in either Budapest or Austin.
Wise believes teams are strongest when they are diverse, equitable, and inclusive. We celebrate our differences, and inclusive teams help us live our values of being for everyone, everywhere.
