Engineering Lead - Connect

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 (Linux command line, logs/metrics/traces) Kubernetes & Microservices at Scale: Experience operating microservices in a containerised environment, ideally Kubernetes Familiarity with service mesh architectures (e.g. Istio/Linkerd concepts), including HTTP routing, identity, and traffic management patterns Cloud & Automation: Broad design and operational experience on public cloud (ideally AWS) Strong passion for automation: building and testing tooling that reduces operational toil and improves safety and consistency Desirable: Reading familiarity with Go and/or C++ (writing experience is a plus) Kubernetes networking experience (services, ingress patterns, DNS, load balancing fundamentals) Networking protocols and concepts from L3 to L7, including application-level concerns Backend development experience in Go in a continuous delivery environment

Requirements

• eBPF-based packet filtering and tooling experience
• Familiarity with transport layer security and certificate mana

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