Our mission
We're making Africa the first cashless continent.
In 2017, over half the population in Sub-Saharan Africa had no bank account. That's for good reason—the fees are too high, the closest branch can be miles away, and nobody takes cards. Without access to financial institutions, people are forced to keep their savings under the mattress. Small business owners rely on lenders who charge extortionate rates. Parents spend hours waiting in line to pay school fees in cash.
We're solving this by building financial services that just work: no account fees, instantly available, and accepted everywhere. In places where electricity, water and roads don't always work, you can still send money with Wave. In 2017, we launched a mobile app in Senegal for cash deposit, withdrawal, and peer-to-peer and business payments. Now, we have millions of users across six countries and are growing fast.
Our goal is to make Africa the first cashless continent and that's where you come in...
How you’ll help us achieve it
You’ll lead the infrastructure teams, which ensures that Wave’s backend stays as close to “always up” as possible and can scale as our user base grows. Infrastructure is extremely important to Wave for two reasons:
We’re one of the fastest-growing financial services providers ever, which causes a steady stream of new scalability challenges.
We’ve become critical infrastructure for many of our users—if we go down, they can’t access their money.
Because of this, keeping a reliable and secure infrastructure are two of our top engineering priorities.
As an engineering manager, you'll:
- Prioritize the teams’ work in collaboration with senior engineers, the Director of Platform, and local partners.
- Support and mentor your teammates to become more effective engineers and colleagues.
- Design processes (e.g. incident response, postmortem review) that allow the team to operate smoothly.
- Collaborate with other product and platform teams to implement reliability improvements across Wave.
- Attract and hire exceptional engineers to the team.
Key Details
- You can work remotely from anywhere (between UTC -1 and +3) with reliable Internet access.
- You’re willing to travel to one of our key markets once per year for ~6 days (Wave covers all costs). We also provide a yearly stipend of $800 to meet with coworkers.
- We run performance reviews twice a year and award bonuses or promotions to exceptional performers who have been with the company for more than six months.
- This role involves participating in an on-call rotation.
- Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, we are offering a salary of up to $166,900 USD ((paid in your local currency equivalent), plus a generous equity package.
Major benefits:
- Subsidized health insurance for you and your dependents and retirement contributions (both vary from country to country.
- 6 months of fully paid parental leave and subsidized fertility assistance.
- Flexible vacation, with most folks taking between 30-40 days per year.
- $10,000 annual charitable donation matching.
You might be a good fit if you
- Care a lot about working on software whose mission you believe in. Working at Wave positively impacts millions of lives through fast and cheap mobile money services. By helping us stay reliable and scalable, you’ll have a big impact on the lives of lots of underserved people.
- Want to be part of an engineering culture that values simple and straightforward architecture over cutting-edge shiny tech. This helps us keep Wave simple to operate and makes it easier to achieve our reliability goals.
- Want to work on a team where it’s easy to collaborate. Our mission-focused culture makes sure that everyone you’ll work with is here primarily for the same reason—to make our users’ lives better. That alignment makes it easy to work with anyone across the company, even if there’s some tension between your short-term goals. This is especially helpful for teams like infrastructure that collaborate closely with many other product teams.
Requirements
- At least two years of experience as a manager supporting infrastructure teams.
- Willingness to travel to Africa once per year for ~6 days (Wave covers all costs).
- Experience working in Cloud (preferably GCP) and Data Center infrastructure.
- Experience, or an interest in networks, particularly telephony.
- People management experience: coaching, performance evaluation, mentorship, and career development.
- Relevant project management experience: specifically prioritization, tracking schedules and deadlines, and communicating across team/org boundaries.
- Experience managing process design: running a smooth on-call rotation, incident response, postmortems, load testing, capacity planning, etc.
- Hiring experience: You can predict staffing needs, design interview loops, evaluate candidates, and assist with closing candidates at the offer stage.
Technical Skills
- Experience with cloud and data centre architecture, cost management, software development, and orchestration of containerised workloads.
- About the Infrastructure teams
The Infrastructure teams’ scope includes:
- Building tooling to observe and debug outages and performance problems.
- Hardening Wave’s backend to be more resilient to incidents.
- Enabling product teams to discover and fix reliability/performance issues in code they own.
- Responding to incidents, analyzing postmortems, and prioritizing the resulting action items.
- Building the hybrid cloud and data center infrastructure to run our application and telephony services.
Some recent projects, as examples of specific things the team has worked on:
- Created a multi-region failover process to restore our services in another region in less than 1h.
- Launched several data center locations to run our application and telephony services locally.
- Built load-testing infrastructure to make sure we’re ready to handle, e.g., millions of sheep purchases during Tabaski.
- About Engineering at Wave
We value:
- Boring technology
- Simple, predictable designs
- Deeply understanding our tools and systems
- Being tenacious in the face of tricky problems
- Constantly trying to improve, as engineers and colleagues
Our current tech stack:
- Backend: Python 3 (+ mypy) monolith
- Monitoring/observability: Honeycomb, Datadog, PGAnalyze
- Database: Postgres
- Orchestration: Kubernetes
- Infrastructure: GCP/DCs/Terraform
- Networking: Wireguard, Tailscale, Palo Alto, F5
- Telephony: Flex, Asterisk, Twilio
- Cache: Redis
- Data warehouse: Snowflake
- API layer: GraphQL
- Android frontend: Kotlin/Jetpack
- iOS frontend: Swift/SwiftUI
- Web frontend: TypeScript/React
- #LI-VV1
Our team
We have a rapidly growing in-country team in Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, and Uganda, plus remote team members spread across the world.
We're deeply passionate about our mission of bringing radically affordable financial services to the people who need them most.
We foster autonomy for our employees. You'll own your projects at every stage, from understanding the problem to monitoring your solution in production.
We raised the largest Series A in Africa in 2021. Our world-class investors, include Founders Fund, Sequoia Heritage, Stripe, Ribbit Capital, Y Combinator, and Partech Africa.
In 2023, we were on Y Combinator's top 50 companies by revenue.
