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
Wave is now the largest financial institution in Senegal, with over 7 million users. And, we’re still in the early days of our product roadmap and potential impact on people’s everyday lives.
As a Databases Engineer at Wave, you will ensure our databases are highly reliable, scalable, and performant to support our rapid growth. You will design, implement, and maintain robust infrastructure and tools to handle millions of transactions daily across multiple countries. Key focus areas include:
- Improving our Kubernetes-based database workloads in the cloud and local datacenters
- Improving database observability through metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting
- Optimising performance and efficiency of backend services and databases
- Collaborating with product teams to proactively improve the reliability of our services
- Participating in and improving our on-call incident response processes
- Championing security and compliance in our infrastructure
In this role, you will have the opportunity to tackle exciting challenges, such as:
- Improving our automation and DB operations as we scale to 14 DB clusters for countries (and growing)
- Improve our hybrid infrastructure architecture in partnership with the infrastructure team
- Build tooling to load test our databases to find and remove bottlenecks
- Ensuring 99.99% uptime for payment processing despite unreliable infrastructure and communications
- Enabling instant money transfers for millions of users across several countries
- Leading or being involved in the resolution of complex incidents and problems
Key Details
- You can work remotely from anywhere (between GMT +3 and GMT -5) with reliable Internet access
- Wave covers travel once per year to one of our operating countries in Africa, as well as a yearly stipend of $800 to meet with coworkers
- We run performance reviews twice a year and award bonuses or promotions to strong 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 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
Requirements
- 7+ years of experience in an engineering role
- Strong experience in managing Relational Databases in Kubernetes or self-hosted at scale
- Solid understanding of networking, distributed systems, and database concepts
- Track record of successfully implementing observability and other SRE best practices
- Proficiency in at least one backend language, preferably Python
- Ability to debug and optimize complex systems
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills
- Passion for our mission of bringing financial services to underserved markets
Bonus points for:
- Experience supporting high-volume transactional systems in the finance/payments domain
- Familiarity with our tech stack (Postgres, Redis, GraphQL)
- Knowledge of security and compliance standards for financial services
- Contributions to open-source projects or database community
You might be a good fit if you:
- Care a lot about working on software whose mission you can believe in
- Have a bias for action. You see a problem, you fix a problem. You get buy-in for your solutions and keep tickets moving
- Have a growth mindset and a willingness to use your skills and experience to mentor less-experienced engineers
- Have the desire to learn from others and make yourself better every day
- Are excited to build world-class infrastructure that powers economic opportunity for an entire continent
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 stack (note that we will train you on any of these—you don't need prior experience—and you probably won't work much/at all with the frontend parts):
- Infrastructure: GCP / Terraform
- Orchestration: Kubernetes
- Database: Postgres
- Cache: Redis
- Backend: Python 3 (+ mypy)
- API layer: GraphQL
- Android frontend: Kotlin/Jetpack
- iOS frontend: Swift/SwiftUI
- Web frontend: TypeScript/React
- 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.
How to apply
Fill out the form below, and upload a resume in English and a cover letter describing your interest in Wave and the role.
We review applications frequently and recommend that you apply to the role that most closely aligns with your skills, experience and career goals.
Wave is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.
Top Skills
What We Do
We're making Africa the first cashless continent.
In 2017, nearly 60% of adults 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 November 2017, we launched a mobile app in Senegal for cash deposit, withdrawal, and peer-to-peer and business payments. In 2019, we expanded to Cote D'Ivoire. Now, we have millions of users and are growing fast.
Our goal is to drive financial inclusion and make Africa the first cashless continent
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