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
Wave is one of the fastest-growing financial services ever. You’ll help us gracefully handle that growth by designing simple, resilient, and observable systems that can keep up with demand.
Our to-do list changes constantly, but here are some recent projects as examples of what you might work on:
- Improve the throughput of our double-entry accounting ledger by tracking down subtle edge cases in Postgres’ implementation of serializable isolation.
- Scale our database by introducing delayed read replicas while preserving within-session read-your-writes consistency.
- Build load-testing infrastructure to make sure we’re ready to handle, e.g., millions of sheep purchases during Tabaski.
Requirements
- You care a lot about working on software whose mission you can believe in.
- You have at least 4 years of professional experience working on site reliability.
- You’ve worked with cloud-based environments and networking.
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
Key Details
- You can work remotely from anywhere (between UTC -5 and +4) with reliable Internet access as long as you have work authorization in the following countries: US, Canada, Belgium, Germany, UK, Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, Kenya, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Uganda or Senegal. We are happy to consider applications outside of these locations.
- 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.)
- This role involves participating in an on-call rotation. (Details of the rotation depend on which team you join.)
- 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 138,000-240,000 USD (or local equivalent), plus equity targeted to be worth 4-6x your 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 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 Sequoia, Stripe, Founders Fund, Ribbit Capital, Y Combinator, and the cofounders of PayPal.
