Observability Specialist, Wave
Financial services for underbanked communities
Be an early applicant
Financial services for underbanked communities
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
1001+ employees
Company mission
To make Africa the first cashless continent.
Role
Who you are
- Care a lot about working on software whose mission you can believe in
- Have a bias for action. You see a problem, you fix a problem. You get buy-in for your solutions and keep work moving
- Approach your work with a growth mindset and use your skills and experience to mentor less-experienced engineers
- Are excited to build world-class infrastructure that powers economic opportunity for an entire continent
- 5+ years of experience in observability, SRE, platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, backend engineering, or production systems engineering
- Deep understanding of metrics, logging, tracing, profiling, alerting, dashboards, service-level indicators, and incident response workflows at scale
- Experience building internal tools, libraries, automation, or platforms used by other engineers
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills. This role succeeds by helping other engineers build, operate, and debug better systems
- Pragmatic judgment about when to improve tooling, when to simplify, and when to avoid unnecessary complexity
- Experience learning, analyzing, and working on other people’s code
- Proficiency in at least one backend language, preferably Python
- Experience with observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Tempo, Loki, Honeycomb, Sentry, or similar systems
- Experience with at least some our stack, Postgres, CockroachDB, Redis, GraphQL, or Kubernetes
- Experience with OpenTelemetry instrumentation and collector configuration at scale
What the job involves
- 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
- Improve our understanding of production behaviour across application code, GraphQL APIs, databases, caches, Kubernetes workloads, cloud infrastructure, async jobs, and on-premises environments
- Partner with product and platform teams to define meaningful service-level indicators, reduce alert fatigue, and ensure alerts are actionable, reliable, and tied to user impact
- Build internal tooling and self-service workflows that help engineers instrument services, investigate incidents, analyse performance, and understand dependencies
- Help teams identify reliability, latency, capacity, and cost issues before they become user-facing incidents
- Establish and implement observability standards, documentation, and training materials that scale across Wave’s engineering organisation
- Operate and improve our observability platform (e.g., Datadog, Honeycomb, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) while controlling costs as data volume grows
- 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:
- Ownership, management and evolution of observability tools: Datadog, Honeycomb, Sentry, and Pyroscope
- Design of SLOs and support product teams in implementing them
- Support all teams in improving their alert quality
- Ownership of observability modules and code, ensuring consistent naming conventions across all our systems
- Some recent and potential projects, as examples of specific things the team has worked on:
- Early detection of regressions in our code. This could be a performance, reliability, or other regression that impacts our users
- CPU profiling in production
- SLO support for product teams
- Scaling our Observability platform to support 4x our current volume while keeping costs in check
Application process
- 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
Our take
Because of things like high fees and a lack of local branches, about half of the adults in Africa still do not have a bank account. Although this is an improvement on past estimates, the continent is still significantly underbanked - which is what Wave helps to combat.
Wave addresses this banking gap with technology, offering a straightforward and cost-effective tool accessible via mobile. The impact has been substantial. A 2021 GSMA report suggested over 500 million mobile money accounts were registered in Africa, facilitating transactions valued at nearly $500 billion.
Wave has already established its presence in Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Gambia and Mali, using steady investment to expand its footprint and reach unicorn status. It also continues to enhance product development and engineering efforts, as well as shore up business operations. Despite challenger companies emerging, Wave has a considerable head start on the competition.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
9% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Mar 2022
$10m
LATE VC
Sep 2021
$200m
SERIES A
Total funding: $210.2m
Company benefits
- Subsidised health insurance for you and your dependents (vary from country to country)
- 6 months fully paid parental leave and subsidized fertility assistance
- Flexible vacation, with most folks taking between 30-40 days per year
- $10,000 annual charitable donation matching
- Retirement contributions (vary from country to country)
- Yearly travel to one of our African operating countries
Company HQ
Mermoz Sacre-coeur, Dakar, Dakar Region
Leadership
Drew Durbin
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously co-founder and CEO at Sendwave (International Remittance).
Lincoln Quirk
(Co-Founder)Previously co-founder and CTO at Newsbrane, Engineer at Demiurge Studios and co-founder of Sendwave (International Remittance).
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