Engineering Lead - Connect

About this role

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: Service mesh and L7 traffic management (Envoy-based) Public and private ingress (including Cloudflare) 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: 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 Proxying, Traffic Management & Networking Foundations: 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 (L

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