Zepz

My colleagues at Sendwave really believe in the company mission of making sending money home to loved ones as cheap and easy as possible. It's kept at the core of what we do and reenforced by senior management regularly.

I'm working some of the most experienced, clever developers I have met. I learn things about the software lifecycle daily and am challenged to meet the standard set by others.

Sendwave communicates through public for almost everything, which really helps keeping up with what others are working on. We embrace embarrassing honesty and I have never been shamed for my mistakes.

Sendwave's mission is to make it easier and cheaper for immigrants and migrant workers to send money home to their friends and family. We hear stories from our users about how they use Sendwave to send money home for their family's schooling or medical bills and are lifesavers for them - our users love us. The competitors tend to be predatory on vulnerable people, and it feels good to make a product that makes people's lives better. Next, we're hoping to take on providing financial services for the unbanked.

One of Sendwave's values is "embarassing honestly," where we encourage people to ask questions that might seem obvious, because usually the answer isn't obvious to everyone, and asking questions is how we grow and learn.

This is, by far, the most diverse engineering team I've ever worked on. We have engineers from Kenya, Senegal, Brazil, the UK, the US, Mexico, and a bunch of other places - a lot of people who know about Sendwave are from the communities that we serve, which in turn leads to a lot applicants from those communities. We're also quite LGBTQIA+ friendly.

By enabling the flow of money to those who need it most, we're addressing a crucial worldwide need and a real problem for our users. During the pandemic, a lot of the traditional methods for sending money abroad weren't available, so people turned to digital apps like Sendwave to continue supporting their loved ones. Our mission motivates me and makes me proud of what I do.

Employees at Sendwave care about our mission, and together with the flexibility and perks that come with a remote working culture, we're able to attract top talent from around the world. I'm continuously learning from my co-workers, e.g. one team-mate was a staff engineer at Slack before joining Sendwave, another worked at Safaricom in Kenya, another founded a mobile-money startup.

Sendwave has a transparent job-level rubric for every job family, and we have regular 1-1s with our engineering manager to help us with our career progression. Everyone has a performance review, which includes the opportunity to progress, every 6 months. It's not uncommon for people to be promoted by more than one level if they're clearly outperforming their current role. The salary scale is consistent across the company and completely transparent, giving people a fair chance of success. Finally, since the team is growing quickly, there have been multiple opportunities to move into new roles or teams and get involved in growing the business. For me, after 1 year at Sendwave, I was grateful that my manager encouraged me to take on a more challenging role, which really helped me level up in my career. It was a refreshing change from my previous workplace where I felt people's potential wasn't always recognised.