Engineering Lead - Connect
About the role
We’re looking for an Engineering Lead to own our Connect domain — the upper networking layer that helps Wise services , customers and partners to communicate safely, reliably, and efficiently.
Connect is responsible for key parts of our platform networking offering, including:
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Service mesh and L7 traffic management (Envoy-based)
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Public and private ingress (including Cloudflare)
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Traffic policy, workload identity, request routing, and reliability patterns that enable hundreds of teams to run 1000 services safely at scale
Wise runs 500+ microservices in a containerised cloud environment (Kubernetes). Connect provides the paved path for service-to-service and edge connectivity: making it easy for product teams to build and operate services while meeting high standards for resilience, security, and performance.
You’ll lead a team of 5–8+ engineers in a fast-moving environment, partnering closely with platform, security, and product engineering to ensure Wise can scale without sacrificing reliability or safety.
How we work
At Wise , we optimise for autonomy with accountability.
Connect sits at the intersection of platform engineering, networking, security, and developer experience. We aim to create strong defaults, self-service tooling, and clear operational ownership — so teams can move quickly without reinventing core connectivity patterns.
As an Engineering Lead, you’ll build an environment where engineers feel safe to share ideas, challenge decisions, and grow — while keeping a strong customer focus and operational discipline.
What will you be working on?
Connectivity Platform Leadership:
Own the vision and execution for Wise ’s connectivity layer: service mesh, ingress, and traffic management primitives that support platform scale and reliability and security.
Service Mesh Architecture & Operations:
Evolve our service mesh capabilities (e.g. routing, service identity, traffic policy, observability, resilience patterns). Drive reliable adoption patterns across a large microservice estate.
Edge & Ingress (Public and Private):
Own and improve our ingress platforms (including Cloudflare), ensuring secure, observable, high-performance access into Wise systems with clear operational controls.
Reliability, Performance & Resilience:
Build and operate highly reliable L4/L7 proxy infrastructure (Envoy and related components). Improve SLOs, latency, capacity management, and incident prevention.
Developer Experience & Enablement:
Create paved paths: automation, templates, tooling, and documentation that make the “right way” the easiest way for product teams.
Security by Design:
Partner with security teams to implement defence-in-depth: network isolation patterns, secure defaults, certificate/identity practices, and platform-level controls that scale.
Team Leadership & Coaching:
Lead, mentor, and grow a team of engineers. Set clear expectations, enable strong technical decision-making, and develop engineers through feedback and opportunities.
Operational Ownership:
Own business-critical systems with a pragmatic approach to operations: on-call health, incident response, postmortems, and continuous improvement.
What do you need?
We recognise that people come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. You don’t need to meet every requirement below to apply.
Leadership & Communication:
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Experience leading and managing engineering teams (typically 3–8+), including mentoring and performance support
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Strong stakeholder management: comfortable influencing priorities across teams and aligning on technical direction
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Ability to balance customer outcomes, reliability, and engineering sustainability
Proxying, Traffic Management & Networking Foundations:
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Experience building and operating software-based L4/L7 proxies (e.g. Envoy, Nginx, Apache)
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Knowledge of service-to-service communication concerns: routing, retries/timeouts, load balancing, rate limiting, and observability