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Wise
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Senior ML Engineering Lead - Financial Crime

WiseLondon, England, United Kingdom
HybridSoftware engineeringsenior£135,000 - £175,000Verified employer
Source checked 3 hours ago. · Posted 10 days ago.
Checked today

Role details

Company Description

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.
  • More about our mission and what we offer .

Job Description

About the role

  • Wise protects millions of customers and billions in transactions from fraud, money laundering and financial crime.
  • Our ML systems are the front line of defense - operating at a global scale of 100K requests/minute under strict sub-50ms latency SLAs.
  • We need an exceptional technical leader to own how these models are engineered, shipped and scaled.
  • We're hiring a Senior ML Engineering Lead to build and grow Wise's Risk Modelling engineering pillar.
  • You will own the full model lifecycle standard for financial crime detection - from offline experimentation to production deployment and real-time monitoring and build the team to execute it.
  • Your job is to build the automated engineering ecosystem and organisation that scales this safely to hundreds of models.
  • This is a rare greenfield leadership role with strong investment and engagement from Wise's CTO and senior leadership.

How we work:

Risk ML sits within Wise's FinCrime organisation, owning the full ML and AI foundation for financial crime detection. We're have three dedicated pillars - Feature Platform, Learning Loop and Risk Modelling. You'll lead the Risk Modelling pillar, leading a team of Senior ML Systems Engineers and Applied ML Engineers.

We operate with high autonomy and low hierarchy. You'll own the engineering strategy end-to-end - from architecture decisions and infrastructure design through to hiring, team culture and cross-platform partnerships. We value leaders who shape direction and build teams, not just manage delivery.

What will you be working on?:

The Model FactoryArchitect the declarative pipeline that turns a configuration file into a deployed, monitored model - the engineering backbone for scaling to hundreds of models
The Experimentation EngineEstablish the reusable path from research (partnering with DS Research) to high-throughput production for traditional and modern architectures
Model OperationsBuild the infrastructure for automated retraining, drift detection, threshold simulation/management and audit trails - the operational layer required to run hundreds of models safely at scale
The TeamRecruit, lead and mentor a world-class team of ML engineers. Establish a high-performance, engineering-first culture from scratch - setting hiring standards, technical bar and growth paths
Cross-Platform PartnershipDefine and navigate the partnership with key platform teams - owning the build vs consume decisions for your pillar

What do you need?:

  • You've explicitly led or built an ML Engineering or model lifecycle automation team (not just used one) at a high-growth company - you defined the standards that other engineering teams followed
  • System-level and mathematical depth: you can design a model factory architecture, review a training pipeline & debug a runtime inference latency regression
  • Experience in high-throughput environments where latency constraints are tight and model failures carry massive financial consequences
  • Track record of hiring and developing senior engineers - you've built a team, not just inherited one
  • Ability to navigate ambiguity and make architecture-level decisions with incomplete information - this is a greenfield build, not an optimisation role
  • Strong enough technically to guide and review across deep learning, ML systems and production infrastructure - you lead through depth, not just delegation

Nice to Have

  • Experience at a tier-1 fintech or payments company
  • Experience with graph-based methods (GNNs, entity resolution) in production
  • Foundation model fine-tuning or LLM evaluation experience
  • Experience establishing ML engineering practices in organisations transitioning from classical ML to deep learning

Interested? Find out more:

  • How we work – a practical guide
  • DEI @ Wise
  • Wise Tech Stack (2025 update)
  • See what it's like to work at Wise London!
  • Our Engineering career map
  • Wise Engineering – https://medium.com/wise-engineering

What do we offer:

  • Starting
salary£135,000 - £175,000 + RSUs
  • Wise Benefits

#LI-AB3 #LI-Hybrid

Additional Information

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.
  • If you want to find out more about what it's like to work at Wise visit Wise.Jobs .
  • Keep up to date with life at Wise by following us on LinkedIn and Instagram .