Engineering Manager-Database Reliability

Overview

Wave is making Africa the first cashless continent. In 2017, over half the population in Sub-Saharan Africa had no bank account. We’re solving this by building financial services that just work: no account fees, instantly available, and accepted everywhere. Now, we have millions of users across 9 countries and are growing fast.

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 (UK, Spain, 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 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.
• 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 $178,200 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.

Tagged as: Android, DevOps, docker, GraphQL, High-Salary, ios, kotlin, PostgreSQL, Python, React, senior, SQL, swift, Terraform, Typescript