Site Reliability Engineer

How you’ll help us achieve it

Wave is now the largest financial institution in Senegal, with over 7 million users. And, we’re still in the early days of our product roadmap and potential impact on people’s everyday lives.

As a Site Reliability Engineer at Wave, you will be responsible for ensuring our systems are highly reliable, scalable, and performant to support our rapid growth. You will design, implement, and maintain robust infrastructure and tools to handle millions of transactions daily across multiple countries.

In this role, you'll;

• Improve system observability through metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting.
• Optimize performance and efficiency of backend services and databases.
• Automate cloud and datacenter operations and promoting infrastructure-as-code best practices.
• Collaborate with product teams to proactively improve the reliability of our services.
• Participate in and improve our on-call incident response processes.
• Champion security and compliance in our infrastructure.
• Scale our ledger to handle 10x transaction volume.
• Ensure 99.99% uptime for payment processing despite unreliable infrastructure and communications.
• Keep costs stable while we scale.
• Detect and block fraud in real-time at a massive scale.
• Securely store, transfer, and encrypt sensitive financial data.
• Enable instant money transfers for millions of users across several countries
• Lead or be involved in the resolution of complex incidents and problems

Key Details

• This is a fully remote role. Candidates must be based in one of our talent hub countries (UK, Spain, USA, Canada, 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. Exceptions apply, but we’ve found this key to understanding our users and product.
• This role involves participating in an on-call rotation.
• Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, we are offering a salary of up to $190,100 USD (paid in your local currency equivalent) 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 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

• 4+ years of experience in an SRE or DevOps role
• Solid understanding of networking, distributed systems, and database concepts
• Track record of successfully implementing observability, CI/CD, and other SRE best practices
• Strong experience with cloud platforms (GCP preferred), Kubernetes, Terraform
• Proficiency in at least one backend language, preferably Python
• Ability to debug and optimize complex systems
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills
• Passion for our mission of bringing financial services to underserved markets

Bonus points for:

• Experience supporting high-volume transactional systems in the finance/payments domain
• Familiarity with our tech stack (Postgres, Redis, GraphQL, Android/iOS)
• Knowledge of security and compliance standards for financial services
• Contributions to open-source projects or infrastructure community

You might be a good fit if you:

• Care a lot about working on software whose mission you can believe in
• Have a bias for action. You see a problem; you fix a problem. You get buy-in for your solutions and keep tickets moving
• Have a growth mindset and a willingness to use your skills and experience to mentor less-experienced engineers
• Have the desire to learn from others and make yourself better every day
• Are excited to build world-class infrastructure that powers economic opportunity for an entire continent

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

#LI-REMOTE