Job Description

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

We're looking for a CTO who wants to own engineering end to end: the systems, the people, and the standards for a company whose work changes lives.

• Keep us moving fast as we get bigger: We deliberately favour fewer processes, simple designs, and deeply understood tools, because that's what lets a small team operate a system this important. Your job is to protect that as the headcount grows and ensure more ownership per engineer, and a clear view of where complexity is worth the tradeoff.
• Own reliability: Wave is the financial system for tens of millions of people. You'll set the standards for uptime, incident response, and how carefully we change things that move money and you'll be accountable when we fall short.
• Build and lead the leadership layer: You'll inherit 5 direct reports and an engineering organization of ~132 people including security, data and infrastructure. You will be responsible for hiring, developing, and where necessary replacing engineering managers and directors. You'll be personally involved in senior hiring.
• Set our vision on AI: Set our vision on AI. We’re already seeing AI accelerate product velocity, but we think we’re in the early days of what we can do with AI in our apps and to move faster across the org. We want you to make Wave a truly AI forward organization.
• Support expansion. Wave already has over 25M users with accelerating growth. This scale and each new market brings new challenges and constraints. You’ll help us plan the right architecture and organizational structure to help us grow smoothly and consistently.
• Represent engineering to the company. Wave is very transparent, whether that’s defaulting to public conversations in slack, frequent Ask Wave Anything sessions, or defaulting to writing public docs to explain major decisions. You'll communicate openly and clearly about what engineering is doing and why, to an audience that includes engineers, non-engineers, our leadership team, and our when needed regulators.

Key details

Reports to: Drew Durbin, CEO.

Team: Around ~132 engineers across 5 teams (Payment, User-facing products, Internal, non-product teams and platform) plus 5 leaders. Engineering teams are co-led by Product Managers and an engineering manager.

Stack: Python 3 with mypy on the backend, GraphQL API layer, Postgres and Redis, Kotlin/Jetpack on Android (our main client), Swift/SwiftUI on iOS, TypeScript and React on the web. Infrastructure on GCP, managed with Kubernetes and Terraform. Most backend work happens in a large Python monolith, deployed across multi-country architecture. Current in-flight work includes agentic developer tooling, a large scale migration of our databases, and some refactoring of our monolith.

Location: This is a fully remote role. Candidates must be based in one of our talent hub countries (Spain, UK, East Coast of USA, Canada, Kenya, Ghana) or in one of our operating markets in Africa including Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, or Burkina Faso etc. Expect to travel to our markets a minimum of twice per year to stay close to local realities, products, teams and of course our users. Wave covers all costs.

Compensation: 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 $356,500 USD, plus a generous equity package:

• Wave provides a yearly $1,200 stipend to support coworking meetups with teammates.
• Major benefits:

Process: The process runs up to 5 conversations, including 2 technical discussions. We want this to be a 2-way assessment: as much a chance for you to evaluate us as for us to get to know you. Along the way you'll meet our CEO, Head of People, Head of Product, both Engineering Directors, and a senior leader from one of our markets.

Requirements

• You've managed an engineering organization of at ~100 people, including managers who manage others. You can describe how your own job changed as the org grew.
• You have a software engineering background and are good at it. You can still read code and follow a technical argument to the end.
• You've been accountable for a system where failure was expensive: money, safety, or regulated data.
• You've hired senior engineering leaders, and you've moved someone out of a role that wasn't working. You can talk about both honestly.
• You write well. Clear, short, and persuasive, for readers who aren't engineers.
• You have a clear and positive point of view on AI in engineering: something you've tried, changed, or abandoned, not a plan to look into it.
• You believe in what we're building and can say why without being prompted.

You might be a good fit if you

• Would rather run a great team than be the smartest engineer in the room, and don't feel a loss in that trade.
• Are comfortable being the person who says the unwelcome thing in a meeting, and can do it without making it personal.
• Change your mind in public when the evidence changes.
• Prefer the simplest system that works to the most interesting one.
• Care about what our users actually experience: how long a transfer takes on a bad network, what happens to a shop owner when a deposit fails and bring that up unprompted when discussing infrastructure.
• Take responsibility for outcomes rather than processes, including when the outcome is bad.
• Are drawn to a company that publishes its numbers internally every month, expects direct feedback in both directions, and would rather be embarrassingly honest than comfortable.

Our team

• We have a rapidly growing in-country team in Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Uganda, Niger, Sierra Leone, and Cameroon 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.
• We are on Y Combinator's top 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.