Engineering Manager - Database Reliability

About Wave

Wave aims to transform Africa into the first cashless continent by providing accessible, affordable, and reliable financial services. Many people in Sub-Saharan Africa lack bank accounts due to barriers such as high fees, distant branches, and limited card acceptance. Wave’s mobile application launched in Senegal in 2017, enabling cash deposits, withdrawals, and peer-to-peer and business payments. With millions of users across nine countries, Wave is expanding rapidly.

Role Overview

As the Engineering Manager for Database Reliability, you will lead a team responsible for ensuring Wave’s databases remain consistently operational and scalable to meet growing demand. Database reliability is vital given Wave’s rapid growth and its role as essential financial infrastructure for many users. Your leadership will help maintain secure, robust database systems underpinning Wave’s services.

Key Responsibilities

• Guide engineers in designing, maintaining, and evolving high-performance, reliable database systems across various environments.
• Provide mentorship and coaching to a diverse, globally distributed database engineering team.
• Develop and improve operational procedures like incident response, postmortems, and capacity planning.
• Work collaboratively with infrastructure, product, and security teams on database-related initiatives.
• Drive best practices for monitoring, cost management, and performance tuning of Postgres, CockroachDB, and future databases.
• Recruit and develop the team, shaping Wave’s culture and standards for database reliability.

Technology Stack

• Backend: Python 3 (with mypy)
• API: GraphQL
• Android frontend: Kotlin/Jetpack
• iOS frontend: Swift/SwiftUI
• Web frontend: TypeScript/React
• Databases: Postgres, CockroachDB
• Infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Terraform
• Orchestration: Kubernetes

Location and Compensation

• This is a fully remote position requiring candidates to be located within specified talent hubs or operational countries in Africa, including Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, or Burkina Faso.
• A $1,200 annual stipend is provided to support coworking meetups with team members.
• Remote employees are expected to travel once yearly to operational markets for approximately six days, with expenses covered.
• Salaries are competitive and transparently calculated, potentially reaching up to $227,900 USD annually plus equity, depending on experience and location.
• Additional benefits include subsidized health insurance for employees and dependents, retirement contributions, six months fully paid parental leave, fertility assistance, flexible vacation policies (typically 21-30 days excluding statutory holidays), and up to $10,000 in annual charitable donation matching.

Candidate Requirements

• A minimum of five years managerial experience supporting database or storage teams.
• Located within a GMT-1 to GMT+3 timezone.
• Willing and able to travel to Africa about once a year for around six days.
• Proven people management capabilities including coaching, performance evaluation, mentorship, and career development.
• Project management expertise, particularly in prioritization, schedule tracking, deadline management, and inter-team communication.
• Experience in process design involving on-call rotations, incident management, postmortems, load testing, and capacity planning.
• Hiring proficiency, including forecasting staffing needs, designing interview processes, candidate evaluation, and assisting in offer negotiations.

Technical Expertise

• Demonstrated success managing mission-critical production databases covering replication, backups, migrations, and high availability/disaster recovery.
• Experience with Kubernetes and container orchestration; experience running databases on Kubernetes is advantageous.
• Familiarity with cloud environments, preferably Google Cloud Platform, or data center infrastructure.

Preferred Attributes

• Passion for contributing to impactful financial technology that serves millions in underserved communities.
• Appreciation for straightforward, reliable software and architecture over adopting the latest technologies for their own sake.
• Ability to collaborate effectively across teams sharing mission-driven objectives despite occasional short-term conflicts.
• Enjoyment in tackling complex reliability and performance challenges within large-scale database systems.

About the Database Reliability Team

• Design and implement tools to monitor and debug outages and performance issues.
• Strengthen backend resilience to incidents.
• Empower product teams to identify and remediate reliability and performance problems in their code.
• Handle incident responses, analyze postmortems, and prioritize follow-up actions.
• Recent projects include scaling databases for tenfold load increase, automating backups and disaster recovery, and migrating to CockroachDB.

Engineering Culture

Wave values engineers who deeply engage with problem-solving beyond just delivering tasks. The team acts swiftly, prefers simple solutions that are easy to maintain, and focuses on outcomes that benefit users. While speed and experimentation are encouraged, critical aspects like correctness and security are treated with caution. The culture prioritizes simplicity to serve users reliably and efficiently.

Team and Company Highlights

• The team is rapidly growing with in-country talent across several African nations and remote members worldwide.
• Committed to providing affordable financial services to underserved populations.
• Employees enjoy autonomy and accountability, owning projects end-to-end.
• Wave secured Africa's largest Series A funding in 2021 from top-tier investors including Founders Fund, Sequoia, Stripe, Ribbit Capital, Y Combinator, and Partech Africa.
• Recognized as one of Y Combinator's top revenue-generating companies.

Equal Opportunity

Wave is dedicated to fostering an inclusive workplace that embraces diversity and equal opportunity for all employees.