Backend Engineer – North America Risk

About the role

Wise is looking for a Backend Engineer to join the North America Risk team. You will help protect customers and the business by building real‑time risk and fraud prevention systems that operate at the speed of our users.

Key responsibilities

• Design and implement low‑latency services for real‑time decision making, keeping p99 end‑to‑end latency under 1 second.
• Develop and maintain risk infrastructure for Instant ACH and other high‑value features, using Kafka, Kafka Streams or Apache Flink for event processing.
• Collaborate daily with Data Scientists, Data Analysts and other engineers to create rules, refine ML models and support chargeback investigations.
• Own the full lifecycle of features, from design through production monitoring and incident response.

Required profile

• 4+ years of experience with Java, Kotlin or other JVM languages and deep knowledge of the Spring framework.
• Strong focus on latency and throughput, with experience optimizing JDBC queries and database performance.
• Hands‑on experience with distributed systems, CI/CD pipelines and scalable architecture.
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts to non‑technical stakeholders.

Required skills

• Java
• Kotlin
• Spring Framework
• JDBC and database query optimization
• Kafka / Kafka Streams
• Apache Flink
• CI/CD pipelines
• Distributed systems design