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.

Wave is growing in terms of the countries we’re operating in and the number of users we’re serving. In a compliance-sensitive industry, this means that we’re working with more jurisdictions, and our systems need to serve more users in a greater variety of situations. To help us prepare for this growth, we’re building more flexible and scalable systems for checking IDs, screening users, understanding account ownership, monitoring transactions, and complying with all other local laws and regulations while causing the minimum disruption to our users.

As Engineering Manager, you will lead our Prod Finance and Compliance team (up to six engineers), which builds and maintains systems related to compliance requirements, including KYC, AML, watchlist screening, account limits, and systems that support our treasury and accounting teams. You will work closely with our Finance and Compliance PM and two data analysts to build and maintain the systems that will help us build reliable, customer-friendly compliance systems for the long term.

In This Role, You'll

Collaborate with the product manager to prioritize and scope work.
Support and mentor your teammates to become more effective engineers and colleagues.
Design and implement processes (e.g. status updates, reflection and learning, team bonding) that allow the team to operate smoothly.
Ensure that technical approaches align with business needs.
Create and maintain a positive and collaborative team culture and work environment.

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 $1200 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.
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

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 build a best-in-class customer service experience, 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 are excited to build a team culture that’s positive and collaborative, and to help the engineers level up and advance their careers.
You have experience with our stack (Python backend, postgres database, SQL based accounting tool, simple template-based and react-based web frontends).

Requirements

Fluent in English.
At least one year of experience managing a software engineering team.
Experience working on a compliance focussed team at some point in your career.
You have demonstrable people management experience: coaching, performance evaluation, mentorship, career development.
You’re comfortable with backend server development and SQL.
You have experience managing the day to day work of an engineering team: facilitating meetings, assigning work, identifying when projects are stuck, ensuring we learn from our experience.
You have experience working closely with a product manager to set OKRs and to scope and assign engineering tasks.

We Value

About Engineering at Wave

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

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.

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.