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...
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 senior analytics engineer, you will work to make Wave’s data easy, safe, and reliable to use, enabling better products for our customers.
As a Senior Analytics Engineer, you will work to make Wave’s data easy, safe, and reliable to use, enabling better products for our customers. Some examples of focus areas are:
- Leading dimensional design to structure Wave’s analytics data in ways that are helpful for human and AI end users. Examples of what you mind work on:
- Building out facts, dimensions and One Big Tables (OBTs) as appropriate for a focus area at Wave. This involves working closely with domain partners to understand what’s useful to them and what’s not.
- Standardizing metric creation and usage.
- Building out ways to make it easy to add context for LLMs to data models.
- Managing our extensive snowflake estate with a strong analytical mindset. Examples of what you might work on:
- Finding patterns that are repeated frequently and optimizing them.
- Building tools to identify and turn off stale/unused models.
- Evaluating the impact of an optimization on costs and performance.
- Building tools to improve the analytics development experience. Examples of what you mind work on:
- Creating helpful dbt macros.
- CI/CD checks that catch possibly exploding joins.
- Reducing the pain of iterating on metric design.
- Outside of the focus areas, folk in this role will also;
- Be responsible for the design, build and health of all of our ETL pipelines. Part of the role includes being ‘on-duty’. On duty responsibilities require that you have a working understanding of most parts of the stack.
- Champion best practice across data.
- Be a key partner in the road map of the data platform team.
- This is a fully remote role. Candidates must be based in one of our talent hub countries (UK, Spain, USA (east coast), Canada (east coast), Kenya and Ghana) or in one of our operating markets in Africa including Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, or Burkina Faso.
- Wave provides a yearly $1,200 stipend to support co-working meet ups with teammates.
- Remote team members are expected to travel to our operational markets (e.g. Senegal or Côte d'Ivoire) at least once a year. Exceptions apply, but we’ve found this key to understanding our users and product.
- Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, depending on your level and location, we offer a salary of $123,500 - $176,400 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.
- 5+ years as an analytics or data engineer. Software engineering experience that's focused on data platforms also counts.
- 3+ years of involved experience with Snowflake.This should ideally include experience with performance optimization.
- Experience with dimensional modeling. Ideally you would have built two or more dimensional marts.
- Strong python, sql and dbt experience.
- Familiarity with managing an orchestration platform like dagster or airflow.
- Are proficient in SQL and Python.
- Are a self-starter that excels at exploring problems and collaborating closely with operations teams to drive growth through data.
- Have excellent focus, prioritizing your research and work using an iterative approach (you know when a project is good enough to stop, and you rarely get lost in details).
- Are able to compellingly present your findings to technical and non-technical audiences and make proactive recommendations based on data.
- You excel at choosing the right complexity of analysis for any given business problem, from simple SQL queries to complex experimentation.
- 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.
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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
