Senior Postgres Reliability Engineer

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, and our data is rapidly getting too big to live on a single instance. You'll help us gracefully handle our growth by finding the best ways to scale our data layer.

You'll be one of our first database specialists, so you'll get to define the role and contribute to setting the database team's technical direction.

You'll be responsible for:

• Managing 4+ large self-hosted Postgres clusters on Google Cloud Platform, bare metal (the latter due to data sovereignty requirements), and a Snowflake data warehouse.
• Adding instrumentation to identify performance bottlenecks and surface them to the right teams.
• Building tools, playbooks, and documentation to make it easy for application developers to work with databases.

Requirements

• You care a lot about working on software whose mission you can believe in.
• You have at least 5 years of professional engineering experience.
• You have experience being responsible for the reliability of a large Postgres database serving a transactional workload.

Key details

• You can work remotely from anywhere (between UTC -5 and +4) with reliable Internet access.

• 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.

• Our salaries are competitive and calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, depending on your level of experience and location, we offer a salary range of $160,100 - $239,500(or local equivalent), plus extremely generous equity.

• 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

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 (other than Postgres, these are not requirements , and you probably won't work much/at all with the frontend parts):

• database: Postgres
• infrastructure: GCP / Terraform
• orchestration: Kubernetes (does not manage Postgres)
• backend: Python 3 (+ mypy)
• [you won't work with anything below here, but listing them for completeness]
• API layer: GraphQL
• android frontend: Kotlin/Jetpack
• iOS frontend: Swift/SwiftUI
• web frontend: TypeScript/React

Our team

• We have a rapidly growing in-country team in Senegal, Côte D'Ivoire, Mali, Benin 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 Founders Fund, Sequoia Heritage, Stripe, Ribbit Capital, Y Combinator and Partech Africa.

How to apply

Click the link below to access the application page. Upload a resume and if required, a cover letter, both written in English, describing your interest in Wave and the role. We review applications on a rolling basis.

Wave is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.