Canada; Spain; United Kingdom
Onsite
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...
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.
As an Observability Engineer at Wave, you will help engineers understand, operate, debug, and improve the systems that power payments for millions of users across Africa.
You will own and evolve Wave’s observability platform across our Python backend, GraphQL API, Postgres and CockroachDB databases, Kubernetes workloads, cloud infrastructure, and on-premises environments. Your work will make it easier for product, database, infrastructure, and security teams to detect problems and regressions early, understand system behaviour, resolve incidents quickly, and make well-informed reliability and performance decisions.
You'll work in the newly formed Performance & Observability team and report to the Director of Platform. You'll partner closely with infrastructure, database, and product engineering teams to improve how we instrument our services.
In this role you'll:
About the Performance & Observability Team
The Performance and Observability team was recently formed with the hiring of our first performance engineer, and is expanding with this Observability position. The team is and will continue to define its scope. The observability scope within the team currently is:
Some recent and potential projects, as examples of specific things the team has worked on:
We care about the big picture. We don’t hire engineers to just ship tickets. We hire them to solve problems. That means caring deeply about outcomes, understanding context, and jumping in wherever something’s broken, even if it’s technically “not your area.” When we see problems, inefficiencies, or opportunities to make something better, we act. We dig into operational issues, clarify fuzzy product specs, or step into unfamiliar code to help unblock teammates.
We move as fast as possible. Speed matters. It lets us try things quickly, get feedback early, and course-correct while it’s cheap. So we write small PRs. We aim for MVPs. We leave TODOs and file follow-ups. We don’t over-perfect v1. That said, we’re building a financial product. Some things—like money movement, correctness, or security—deserve more caution.
We like boring technology. We favor tools that are reliable, well-understood, and easy to debug. This keeps us focused on solving meaningful problems instead of wrestling with unpredictable infrastructure. If a new technology helps us move faster, build safer, or solve a real need, we’ll consider it. But we don’t adopt tools just because they’re new—we adopt them because they’re right.
Simplicity is a strategy. It lets us focus our energy where it matters most: serving our users.
#LI-DH1 #LI-REMOTE
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.
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