Engineering Manager - Database Reliability

Our Mission

We aim to make Africa the world's first cashless continent by delivering accessible, affordable, and reliable financial services. Since 2017, millions across Sub-Saharan Africa without bank accounts rely on Wave for instant, fee-free mobile payments, overcoming challenges like distant bank branches and high fees.

Role Overview and Impact

As the Engineering Manager leading our Database Reliability team, you will ensure our databases maintain high availability and scale seamlessly as our user base grows. This role is vital for maintaining the trust and access millions of users have in Wave’s financial services. Your leadership will directly influence our system's resilience and scalability.

Key Responsibilities

• Guide engineers in designing, operating, and evolving robust, high-performance database systems across varied environments.
• Provide mentorship and coaching to a diverse, globally distributed team of database engineers.
• Develop and optimize processes such as incident management, postmortem analysis, and capacity planning to support reliable operations.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with infrastructure, product, and security teams on database platform initiatives.
• Lead best practices in database monitoring, cost optimization, and performance tuning for Postgres, CockroachDB, and other databases.
• Recruit and grow the team, advancing Wave’s database reliability culture and standards.

Technical Environment

• Backend developed in Python 3 with typing support (mypy).
• API layer utilizes GraphQL.
• Mobile frontends built with Kotlin/Jetpack (Android) and Swift/SwiftUI (iOS).
• Web frontend developed using TypeScript and React.
• Databases include Postgres and CockroachDB.
• Infrastructure managed with GCP and Terraform.
• Orchestration through Kubernetes.

Candidate Requirements

• Minimum five years managerial experience supporting database or storage engineering teams.
• Demonstrated leadership skills including coaching, performance reviews, mentorship, and career growth planning.
• Project management capabilities covering prioritization, schedule tracking, and cross-team communication.
• Experience designing and managing operational processes such as on-call rotations, incident response, postmortems, load testing, and capacity planning.
• Background in hiring, from forecasting staffing needs to conducting interviews and negotiating offers.
• Proven expertise in operating mission-critical production databases, including replication, backups, migrations, and high availability/disaster recovery strategies.
• Familiar with Kubernetes container orchestration, ideally with experience running database workloads on Kubernetes.
• Experience working with cloud infrastructure, preferably Google Cloud Platform, or data center environments.
• Willingness to travel annually to Africa for approximately six days, with travel expenses covered by Wave.

Preferred Traits

• Passion for contributing to a mission-driven company positively impacting millions by providing accessible mobile money services.
• Value simplicity and straightforward system architecture to enhance reliability and maintainability.
• Ability to collaborate effectively across teams driven by shared goals despite occasional conflicting priorities.
• Enjoy tackling complex challenges surrounding performance and reliability in large-scale database systems.

Database Reliability Team Scope

• Developing tools for monitoring and troubleshooting outages and performance problems.
• Enhancing backend resilience to prevent incidents.
• Empowering product teams to identify and resolve reliability and performance issues in their codebases.
• Handling incident responses, conducting thorough postmortem analyses, and prioritizing resultant action items.

Recent Team Projects

• Scaling databases to support a tenfold increase in load.
• Automating backups, disaster recovery, and various maintenance tasks.
• Migration of databases to CockroachDB.

About Our Engineering Culture

• We hire engineers to solve problems deeply and impact outcomes beyond just shipping features.
• Our team values speed and iterative development balanced with caution for critical areas like money transfers and security.
• We prioritize stable, well-understood tools over trend-driven technologies to maintain reliability and ease debugging.
• Our philosophy embraces simplicity to focus resources on serving our users effectively.

Additional Information and Benefits

• Fully remote position; candidates must be based in an approved talent hub country or within Wave’s African markets such as Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, or Burkina Faso.
• Annual $1,200 stipend available to support coworking and team meetups.
• Remote employees expected to travel yearly to operational countries for about six days, with exceptions considered.
• Competitive salaries calculated transparently; this role offers up to $227,900 USD annually plus equity depending on level and location.
• Comprehensive benefits include subsidized health insurance for employees and dependents, retirement contributions, six months fully paid parental leave, subsidized fertility assistance, and flexible vacation ranging typically from 21 to 30 days excluding public holidays.
• Annual charitable donation matching up to $10,000.

Our Team and Mission

• A rapidly expanding team across various African countries and remote global members.
• Strong commitment to providing affordable, impactful financial services to underserved populations.
• Employee autonomy with ownership of projects from conception through deployment and monitoring.
• Supported by leading investors and recognized among top revenue-generating companies.

Diversity and Inclusion

We strongly value diversity and inclusivity, ensuring an equitable environment for all employees.