Backend Engineer - North America Risk Prevention

About the Position

Backend Engineer - North America Risk Prevention

Wise is a global technology company, building the best way to move and manage the world’s money. 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.

Responsibilities

• Real-Time Decision Making: Leverage cutting-edge machine learning to run risk assessments instantly, every time a customer uses the calculator (create a quote for a transaction), ensuring a seamless yet secure experience.
• Enabling Unique Features: Own the risk infrastructure for Instant ACH, one of our most unique and high-value features in the US market. Instant ACH provides instant transfers despite the payment network not supporting that.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate daily with Software Engineers, Data Analysts, and Data Scientists to design new rules, refine ML models, and provide critical support to our chargeback and fraud investigation teams.
• Future-Proofing: Expand our scope to handle comprehensive risk types in the US and Canada, including Sanctions and AML (Anti-Money Laundering).

Requirements

• 4+ years of experience with Java, Kotlin, or other JVM-based languages, with deep knowledge of the Spring framework.
• Obsession with Latency: Design technical solutions that optimize for both throughput and speed. Understand what it takes to keep p99 end-to-end latency under 1 second for real-time risk & fraud checks, even when handling billions of transaction volumes.
• Data & Distributed Systems: Deep understanding of JDBC, database internals, and query optimization. Hands-on experience with Kafka, Kafka Streams, or Apache Flink to handle real-time event processing.
• Infrastructure: Experience with CI/CD pipelines and designing scalable, resilient distributed systems.
• Product & User Focus: Prioritize work with the customer in mind, using data to fix pain points (like false positives). Understand that risk checks happen every time a user touches the calculator, and care about that UX.
• Ownership: Take end-to-end ownership of your projects, from the initial idea to monitoring it in production.
• Communication: Articulate complex technical concepts to non-technical audiences.
• Cross-Functional collaboration experience: Comfortable working daily with Data Scientists to put models into production and with Data Analysts to refine rule sets.

Nice to Have

• ML Fluency: Familiarity with machine learning basics: data pipelines, feature engineering, precision/recall.
• Data Lake Experience: Experience with OLAP databases or data lakes (like Apache Iceberg) with Kafka ingestion is an advantage.

We Offer

• Compensation: HUF 1300000 - HUF 1700000 monthly
• Locations: Budapest, Hungary and Austin, United States (On-site)
• Full-time Employment

About the Company

Wise is a global technology company, building the best way to move and manage the world’s money. 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.

For more information about working at Wise, visit Wise.Jobs.