Backend Engineer - NorthAm

The team you will be working with: North America Risk

The North America Risk team is a critical engine within Wise, focusing on our largest and most dynamic market: North America. Our mission is to protect our customers and the business by staying ahead of financial crime. We handle billions of volume through robust risk and fraud prevention systems that operate at the speed of our customers.

What we do

• Real-Time Decision Making: we leverage cutting-edge machine learning to run risk assessments instantly, every time a customer uses the calculator, ensuring a seamless yet secure experience.
• Enabling Unique Features: we own the risk infrastructure for Instant ACH, one of our most unique and high-value features in the US market.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Software Engineers, Data Analysts, and Data Scientists collaborate on a daily basis to design new rules, refine ML models, and provide critical support to our chargeback and fraud investigation teams.
• Future-Proofing: while focused on fraud today, we are expanding our scope to handle comprehensive risk types in the US and Canada, including Sanctions and AML.

The team is distributed across Budapest and Austin. We work closely with our US-based colleagues to understand the North American market and customer needs, with occasional travel to the US to foster in-person collaboration.

What does it take?

• 4+ years of experience with Java, Kotlin, or other JVM-based languages, with deep knowledge of the Spring framework.
• Obsession with latency: you can design technical solutions that optimize for both throughput and speed, keeping p99 end-to-end latency under 1 second for real-time risk & fraud checks.
• Data & distributed systems: deep understanding of JDBC, database internals, and query optimization; hands-on experience with Kafka, Kafka Streams, or Apache Flink.
• Infrastructure: experience with CI/CD pipelines and designing scalable, resilient distributed systems.
• Product & user focus: you prioritize work with the customer in mind, using data to fix pain points.
• Ownership: you take end-to-end ownership of your projects, from the initial idea to monitoring it in production.
• Communication: you can articulate complex technical concepts to non-technical audiences.
• Cross-functional collaboration experience with Data Scientists and Data Analysts.

It is even better if you have

• ML fluency: familiarity with machine learning basics — data pipelines, feature engineering, precision/recall.
• Data lake experience: OLAP databases or data lakes (like Apache Iceberg) with Kafka ingestion.

Wise is a global technology company, building the best way to move and manage the world's money.

Min fees. Max ease. Full speed. Whether people and businesses are sending money to another country, spending abroad, or making and receiving international payments, Wise is on a mission to make their lives easier and save them money. As part of our team, you will be helping us create an entirely new network for the world's money.

For everyone, everywhere. We're people building money without borders — without judgement or prejudice, too. We believe teams are strongest when they are diverse, equitable and inclusive. We're proud to have a truly international team, and we celebrate our differences. Inclusive teams help us live our values and make sure every Wiser feels respected, empowered to contribute towards our mission and able to progress in their careers.