Software Engineer - AML Risk

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’ll be helping us create an entirely new network for the world’s money — for everyone, everywhere. Instant, low cost, and convenient are three guiding principles for Wise products. Those same benefits can also appeal to people who seek to misuse financial services for money laundering and other financial crimes. The IMF estimates that up to 5% of world GDP is laundered each year.

We’re looking for an Engineer to join the AML Squad and help build systems and controls that detect money laundering and terrorist financing risks across Wise’s products and regions — while reducing false alerts and avoiding unnecessary friction for legitimate customers.

About the Role

The AML Risk team, within the AML Squad at Wise, builds detection systems and controls that help identify potential money laundering and terrorist financing activity. We use data and our understanding of criminal behaviour to create effective detection controls and useful alerts. Criminal activity evolves quickly, so we continuously improve our controls as new risks appear — aiming to detect more real risk, reduce false positives, and keep the customer experience smooth. In this role, you will contribute to risk detection and alert creation by owning components and medium-sized projects, working closely with a cross-functional group of engineers, product managers, data scientists, analysts, and AML subject matter experts.

Technical Responsibilities

• Build and improve AML detection controls and the systems that support them.
• Own your work end-to-end: design, implementation, deployment, and ongoing support.
• Write well-tested, maintainable code that is safe to operate in production.
• Use data to understand problems, validate solutions, and measure outcomes.
• Participate in code reviews, improve documentation, and contribute to team engineering standards.
• Design and build with scalability, observability, privacy, security, reliability, and cost in mind.

Collaboration & Ownership Responsibilities

• Work closely with product managers, data scientists, analysts, and AML subject matter experts to translate risk understanding into effective controls.
• Communicate progress, risks, and trade-offs clearly to your team.
• Know when to work independently and when to ask for help, unblocking yourself and others.
• Give and receive constructive feedback, contributing to a strong and supportive engineering culture.

The technology you’ll work with

• Primary stack: Java, Spring Boot, Kafka
• Distributed services and asynchronous processing
• Data-intensive systems operating at scale
• Engineering focus areas: scalability, observability, privacy, security, reliability, and cost