Engineering Manager-Database Reliability

About this role

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 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...

How you'll help us achieve it

Wave is now the largest financial institution in Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire, with millions of users, growing rapidly year-on-year. And, we’re still in the early days of our product roadmap and potential impact on people’s everyday lives.

You’ll lead the database reliability team, which ensures that Wave’s databases are as “always up” as possible and can scale as our user base grows. Database reliability is critical to Wave for two reasons:

• We’re one of the fastest-growing financial services ever, which causes a steady stream of new scalability challenges.

• We’ve become critical infrastructure for many of our users—if we go down, they can’t access their money.

Because of this, keeping a reliable and secure infrastructure are two of our top engineering priorities.

As an engineering manager, you will:

• Support the engineers in architecting, maintaining and evolving reliable, high-performance database technologies across multiple environments.

• Mentor and coach a diverse, globally distributed team of DB engineers.

• Shape and refine processes like incident response, postmortems, and capacity planning to ensure smooth ops.

• Collaborate with infrastructure, product, and security teams on platform database initiatives.

• Drive best practices for monitoring, cost optimisation, and performance tuning in Postgres, CockroachDB and any future database we adopt.

• Hire and grow the team as needed, shaping Wave’s DB reliability culture and standards.

Our stack (prior experience is a strong plus, but not required):

• backend: Python 3 (+ mypy)

• API layer: GraphQL

• android frontend: Kotlin/Jetpack

• iOS frontend: Swift/SwiftUI

• web frontend: TypeScript/React

• database: Postgres/CockroachDB

• infrastructure: GCP/Terraform

• orchestration: Kubernetes

Key Details

• This is a fully remote role. Candidates must be based in one of our talent hub countries 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 coworking meetups 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 up to $\227,900 USD, 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 21-30 days exclusive of statutory holidays.

• $10,000 annual charitable donation matching.

Requirements

• You have at least five years of experience as a manager supporting database or storage teams.

• You’re in a timezone between GMT-1 and GMT+3.

• You’re willing to travel to Africa once per year for ~6 days (Wave covers all costs).

• You will have demonstrable people management experience: coaching, performance evaluation, mentorship, and career development.

• You have relevant project management experience: specifically prioritisation, tracking schedules and deadlines, communicating across team/org boundaries.

• You have experience managing process design: running a smooth on call rotation, incident response, postmortems, load testing, capacity planning, etc.

• You have hiring experience: predicting staffing needs, designing interview loops, evaluating candidates, assisting with closing candidates at offer stage.

Technical Skills

• Proven track record of running mission-critical databases in production (replication, backups, migrations, HA/DR).

• Skilled with Kubernetes and container orchestration (experience running DB workloads in K8s is a bonus).

• You have experience working in Cloud (preferably GCP) or Data Center infrastructure.

You might be a good fit if 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.

• 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.

• 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

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