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 9 countries and are growing fast.
Our goal is to make Africa the first cashless continent and that's where you come in...
You’ll lead the Developer Experience team, which ensures that Wave’s engineers have the right tools and processes to ship value fast and in a reliable way. Developer Experience is extremely important to Wave for two reasons:
- We’re the most innovative fintech in Africa, and we want to accelerate the delivery of new services to our users.
- We’ve become a critical service for many of our users—if we go down, they can’t access their money.
Because of these, creating and delivering new features quickly and ensuring they don’t negatively impact our users are two of our top engineering priorities.
As an engineering manager, you will:
- Prioritize the teams’ work in collaboration with senior engineers, the Director of Platform, and engineering leadership.
- Support and mentor your teammates to become more effective engineers and colleagues.
- Treat the developer platform as a product with internal customers. Run developer surveys, measure adoption, prioritise based on impact, and balance the needs of engineers (fast pipelines) with the needs of the business (compliance, security, incident prevention).
- Drive the development process’s vision end-to-end — from a developer starting to code to that code being safely running in production across multiple countries.
- Evaluate AI-assisted development opportunities pragmatically and introduce them only where they clearly reduce toil or improve quality.
- 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.
- You 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.
- You 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.
- You can work remotely from anywhere (between UTC -1 and +3) with reliable Internet access as long as you have work authorization.
- Every year, you’ll travel to Africa for a one-week immersion trip. (Wave covers all costs.)
- This role involves participating in an on-call rotation.
- Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, depending on your experience level and location, we offer a salary up to $185,800 (or local 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
- Unlimited vacation with a 20-day minimum requirement
- $10,000 annual charitable donation matching
Requirements
- You have at least three years of experience as a manager supporting internal tooling or DevEx teams.
- You’re in a timezone between GMT-1 and GMT+3, or willing to align your work hours to that timezone.
- You’re willing to travel to Africa once per year for ~6 days (Wave covers all costs).
- You have strong experience as a software engineer, preferably in Python environments.
- You think about internal tools as products. You have experience running developer surveys, measuring adoption, defining a roadmap based on user impact, and balancing competing user needs.
- You will have demonstrable people-management experience in coaching, performance evaluation, mentorship, and career development.
- You have relevant project management experience: specifically prioritization, tracking schedules and deadlines, communicating across team/org boundaries
Technical skills
- Hands-on experience with modern CI/CD systems (GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Buildkite, or similar) and the tradeoffs between speed, reliability, and cost.
- Experience with developer productivity tooling: local dev environments, build systems, IDE tooling, dependency management, and observability for developers.
- Working knowledge of Kubernetes and containerised deployments, particularly as they relate to deployment pipelines.
- Familiarity with at least one of: DORA metrics, the SPACE framework, or DX Core 4 — and a clear point of view on what to measure and what not to.
About the DevEx team
The DevEx teams’ scope includes:
- Building local tooling to develop new features in our Python monolith, including IDEs, containerised environments, seed data, etc.
- Managing the lifecycle of internal shared Python modules, including dependency management and security updates.
- Managing our CI pipelines to ensure they are fast, reliable and support all the required quality gates created by other teams like security, performance, etc.
- Agentic coding tooling.
- Developer-facing observability tooling (Sentry)
Some recent projects, as examples of specific things the team has worked on:
- Migration from CircleCI to GitHub Actions +Namespace.
- Creating a Deployments UI to visualise deployments in our complex multi-country hybrid architecture.
- Creating harnesses, skills, and background agents capabilities to safely utilise AI tools in our software development.
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
- cache: Redis
- 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, Uganda, Niger, Sierra Leone, and Cameroon 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.
- We are on Y Combinator's top companies by revenue.
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.
Skills Required
- At least three years of experience as a manager supporting internal tooling or DevEx teams
- Ability to work in a timezone between GMT-1 and GMT+3 or align work hours to that timezone
- Willingness to travel to Africa once per year for ~6 days
- Strong experience as a software engineer
- Experience in Python environments
- Experience treating internal tools as products: running developer surveys, measuring adoption, defining roadmaps
- Demonstrable people-management experience: coaching, performance evaluation, mentorship, career development
- Project management experience: prioritization, tracking schedules/deadlines, cross-team communication
- Hands-on experience with modern CI/CD systems (GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Buildkite, or similar)
- Experience with developer productivity tooling: local dev environments, build systems, IDE tooling, dependency management, developer observability
- Working knowledge of Kubernetes and containerised deployments
- Familiarity with at least one of DORA metrics, the SPACE framework, or DX Core 4
- Participation in an on-call rotation
- Reliable internet access and work authorization for remote work
Wave Mobile Money Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Wave Mobile Money and has not been reviewed or approved by Wave Mobile Money.
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Parental & Family Support — Extended fully paid parental leave and subsidized fertility assistance are emphasized, alongside health coverage that includes dependents. These offerings signal a strong commitment to supporting families across locations, even as exact provisions can vary by country.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Flexible vacation is standard, with most people taking substantial time off in addition to public holidays. Some roles cite even higher ranges, indicating a generous approach to rest and recovery.
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Fair & Transparent Compensation — Salaries are set using a transparent formula tied to skill and experience rather than negotiation. Clear ranges and equity/bonus components indicate market-aligned offers for many roles.
Wave Mobile Money Insights
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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