Staff Product Engineer - Risk & Control Governance

We're looking for an experienced Senior Product Engineer to join the Risk & Control Governance team / Risk Assessment Group. You'll be instrumental in building the governance, assurance, and data foundations that ensure every risk decision at Wise is consistent, explainable, auditable, and continuously monitored. This role works at the intersection of the Risk API platform, Product, and Financial Crime (FinCrime) teams — offering a unique opportunity to build the systems that give Wise confidence in every risk assessment it operates at scale. You will be the driving force behind the platform's trustworthiness and integrity, focusing on: - Data Governance: Building and maintaining data ownership, lineage, and quality monitoring systems that ensure every risk decision is powered by trusted data. - Control Assurance: Designing continuous monitoring and validation systems that verify controls perform as intended — including trigger validation, drift detection, coverage analysis, and control health scoring. - Auditability & Explainability: Implementing end-to-end audit trails, change history tracking, and explainability tooling that enables one-click regulatory evidence generation. - Scalable Solutions: Designing robust, high-throughput solutions that handle large volumes of data and can be quickly understood and scaled across multiple distinct risk domains. What will you be working on? You will join the team at a pivotal moment, with your contributions being immediately visible and critical to the success of the entire Risk Assessment platform's governance layer. The core challenge for the team — and your immediate focus — is to build the assurance and governance foundations that the platform currently lacks, ensuring every control can answer: Was the right trigger used? Was the right data available? Was the right decision made? Is the control still effective? Your immediate impact will be to: - Build Data Trust: Implement data quality monitoring, data contracts, and lineage tracking that give the organisation full traceability from risk decisions back to source data. - Deliver Continuous Assurance: Design and build automated monitoring systems that continuously validate control effectiveness — detecting drift, false positives/negatives, and coverage gaps before they become incidents. - Enable Auditability: Create audit trail infrastructure and explainability tooling that dramatically reduces the effort required for regulatory reporting and compliance evidence generation. - Integrate with Risk API: Work closely with the Risk API team to embed governance and assurance capabilities into the core platform, ensuring clean integration points and shared data contracts. What do you need? - Strong Backend Engineering: Proven experience building high-throughput, data-intensive systems in Java. Hands-on expertise with Kafka, SQL and NoSQL databases, and designing for scale and reliability. - Data Engineering Aptitude: Experience with data quality frameworks, pipeline orchestration, or lineage tracking. You understand what it takes to make data trustworthy at scale. - Systems Thinking: Ability to reason about complex distributed systems, identify failure modes, and design solutions that are both robust and operationally simple. - Ownership & Autonomy: Comfortable operating with ambiguity, defining your own work from high-level objectives, and driving delivery end-to-end without close direction. - Collaborative Mindset: Ability to work effectively across team boundaries — particularly with the Risk API team, Product, and FinCrime stakeholders — to align on contracts, data models, and integration patterns.