Database Platform Engineer, Wave
+ Equity
More information about location
Financial services for underbanked communities
Open for applications
Financial services for underbanked communities
1001+ employees
Open for applications
+ Equity
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To make Africa the first cashless continent.
Role
Who you are
- 7+ years of experience in an engineering role
- Strong experience in managing Relational Databases in Kubernetes or self-hosted at scale
- Solid understanding of networking, distributed systems, and database concepts
- Track record of successfully implementing observability and other SRE best practices
- Proficiency in at least one backend language, preferably Python
- Ability to debug and optimize complex systems
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills
- Passion for our mission of bringing financial services to underserved markets
- 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 tickets moving
- Have a growth mindset and a willingness to use your skills and experience to mentor less-experienced engineers
- Have the desire to learn from others and make yourself better every day
- Are excited to build world-class infrastructure that powers economic opportunity for an entire continent
Desirable
- Experience supporting high-volume transactional systems in the finance/payments domain
- Familiarity with our tech stack (Postgres, Redis, GraphQL)
- Knowledge of security and compliance standards for financial services
- Contributions to open-source projects or database community
What the job involves
- As a Databases Engineer at Wave, you will ensure our databases are highly reliable, scalable, and performant to support our rapid growth
- You will design, implement, and maintain robust infrastructure and tools to handle millions of transactions daily across multiple countries
- Improving our Kubernetes-based database workloads in the cloud and local datacenters
- Improving database observability through metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting
- Optimising performance and efficiency of backend services and databases
- Collaborating with product teams to proactively improve the reliability of our services
- Participating in and improving our on-call incident response processes
- Championing security and compliance in our infrastructure
- Improving our automation and DB operations as we scale to 14 DB clusters for countries (and growing)
- Improve our hybrid infrastructure architecture in partnership with the infrastructure team
- Build tooling to load test our databases to find and remove bottlenecks
- Ensuring 99.99% uptime for payment processing despite unreliable infrastructure and communications
- Enabling instant money transfers for millions of users across several countries
- Leading or being involved in the resolution of complex incidents and problems
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. It also continues to enhance product development and engineering efforts, as well as shore up business operations.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
9% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
Mar 2022
$10m
LATE VC
Sep 2021
$200m
SERIES A
Total funding: $210m
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).
Share this job
View 4 more jobs at Wave