Director of Engineering (Platform)

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 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 make Africa the first cashless continent. And that's where you come in....

How you'll help us achieve it

You'll support Wave's Platform org, which is responsible for building shared infrastructure and tooling to support Wave's growth. The Platform org is currently Wave's fastest-growing engineering group because we're scaling so quickly in both user base and number of engineers. Platform's priorities include:

• Leading efforts to scale Wave's backend via various data sharding approaches
• Allowing us to launch in countries with data sovereignty laws by building and operating on-prem instances of Wave in those countries
• Reliably operating shared infrastructure such as our large and growing fleet of databases
• Implementing monitoring and observability tooling for that shared infrastructure
• Building shared tooling for deployment, testing, etc. to enable product engineering teams to iterate quickly

As Director of Engineering for the Platform org, you will:

• Set the quality bar for tech execution and empower your teams to hit it
• Recruit exceptional engineers and managers
• Mentor and coach team leads to become more effective
• Strengthen Wave’s engineering culture and processes
• Help spin up new teams as our product surface area grows

Requirements

• You value working on software whose mission you can believe in.
• You care a lot about doing the right thing, both for users and for colleagues.
• You have previous experience managing managers.
• You have previous experience working on infrastructure and reliability.
• You have a strong track record of recruiting highly effective engineers and managers.
• You have exceptional judgment: you hone in on the most important considerations and think rigorously about the trade-offs between them.
• You have previous experience coping with a rapidly-growing team, company and user base.

Logistics

• You can work remotely from anywhere (between UTC -5 and +4) with reliable Internet access.

• Every two to four months, you’ll travel to Africa for a one-week retreat with the rest of Wave’s remote team. (Wave covers all costs.) 

• Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, depending on your level of experience and location, we offer a salary range of 191,600-289,300 USD (or local equivalent), plus equity worth 5-6x your annual salary.

• 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

Our team

• We have a rapidly growing in-country team in Senegal, Côte D'Ivoire, Mali, Benin 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 own projects at every stage, from understanding the problem to monitoring your solution in production.
• We’re backed by world-class investors including Founders Fund, Sequoia Heritage, Stripe, Ribbit Capital, Y Combinator and Partech Africa.

How to apply

Click the link below to access the application page. Upload a resume plus a cover letter (if required), both written in English, describing your interest in Wave and the role. We review applications on a rolling basis.

Wave is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.