Engineering Lead - APAC Expansion (Korea)

We are opening a new office in Seoul to support our Asia-Pacific teams and regional expansion plans. As an Engineering Lead in South Korea, you will have the unique opportunity to build beautifully simple experiences that guide our customers through the Wise ecosystem, helping them live, travel, and work without borders. How you’ll be contributing to our team: Seoul Office Seed: As the most senior engineer on the ground, you will act as a foundational 'seed' for the Seoul office, bridging the gap between local operations and APAC regional teams, and fostering a collaborative culture from day one. Being the technical representative of Wise to the regulators: As the most senior technical person in the Seoul Office, you will be representing Wise as a Key Management Personnel and be the main point of contact to regulators and auditors around IT Org and IT Sec. Product Ownership: You will own the technical roadmap for your team, ensuring it addresses critical technical debt, reliability, security, and scalability concerns. Technical Excellence: You will actively contribute to your team's delivery, supporting day-to-day execution while maintaining a high standard for product quality and customer experience. People Leadership: You will directly manage the engineers of your team in the Seoul office, ensuring high effectiveness and performance from team members. Domain Expertise: You will partner with product and design functions to develop and execute a product roadmap that solves real customer problems with measurable impact. System Reliability: You are accountable for the availability and security of the systems you build, ensuring they have appropriate support, SLAs, on-call rosters, and documentation. Incident Management: You will actively help resolve existing incidents within your area of ownership and ensure every incident is properly owned.

What does it take?: Professional fluency in written and spoken English and Korean is required to manage technical documentation and engaging with internal and external stakeholders. Collaborative Communicator: You are a clear communicator who can articulate complex technical concepts to non-technical partners. Lead Mindset: You have experience leading or significantly contributing to technical projects and are comfortable managing the development and deployment lifecycle Technical Depth: You are an expert in your technical discipline with a solid understanding of distributed systems and modern frameworks. Product-Minded: You approach work with a strong passion for user experience and make data-driven decisions to fix customer pain points Engineering Best Practices: You ensure your team follows defined standards for observability, security, and infrastructure usage. What you can expect as an Engineering Lead at Wise: Scope: You will be responsible for defining and building the Korea engineering team structure from the ground up and developing a high-performing team, while ensuring it is correctly sized and integrated with our APAC expansion goals. Team Growth: You are responsible for managing the performance, well-being, and career growth of the engineers you lead through regular feedback and coaching. Culture of Ownership: You will foster a culture of inclusivity, ownership, and accountability where every engineer is empowered to take responsibility for their work. Hiring & Onboarding: You will be a key part of the interview panel, following interviewing best practices, and responsible for the successful onboarding of new hires. Organisational Execution: You will ensure company-wide processes—such as compensation reviews and training—are executed effectively and that your team is correctly sized for its goals. To get the best view of what we expect at all levels of our engineering team, you can take a look at our Engineering Career Map .

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