Our mission

We're making Africa the first cashless continent.

In 2017, over half the population in Sub-Saharan Africa had no bank account. That's for good reason—the fees are too high, the closest branch can be miles away, and nobody takes cards. Without access to financial institutions, people are forced to keep their savings under the mattress. Small business owners rely on lenders who charge extortionate rates. Parents spend hours waiting in line to pay school fees in cash.

We're solving this by building financial services that just work: no account fees, instantly available, and accepted everywhere. In places where electricity, water and roads don't always work, you can still send money with Wave. In 2017, we launched a mobile app in Senegal for cash deposit, withdrawal, and peer-to-peer and business payments. Now, we have millions of users across six countries and are growing fast.

Our goal is to make Africa the first cashless continent and that's where you come in.....

How you'll help us achieve it

We’re looking for an engineer who’s independent and excited about getting things done. You'll be responsible for building and improving the ways people pay and access money with Wave. You'll take ownership of every aspect of the process, starting with a deep comprehension of the problem, collaborating with Product and Engineering managers to identify the optimal solution for our users, leading the entire lifecycle of your project, and assisting the customer support team in resolving issues.

Our to-do list is always evolving, but here are some recent projects:

• Allowing people to access their money cross-border in West Africa.
• Enabling people to use their Wave app to pay for products in stores.
• Allowing people to pay their electricity bills with Wave by integrating with electrical utility companies.
• Building an app for business owners to pay their employees' salaries using Wave.
• Allowing people to pay for their transportation on taxis, trains & buses.

Key details

• You can work remotely from anywhere (between UTC -5 and +4) with reliable internet access.
• Wave covers travel once per year to one of our operating countries in Africa, as well as a yearly stipend of $800 to meet with coworkers.
• Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, depending on your level, we are offering a salary of up to $118,600 USD, plus a generous equity package.
• We run performance reviews twice a year and award bonuses or promotions to strong performers who have been with the company for more than six months.
• Major benefits:
  • Subsidized health insurance for you and your dependents and retirement contributions (both vary from country to country).
  • 6 months of 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.
  • Yearly travel to one of our African operating countries.

Requirements

• Minimum 3 years of professional experience as a software engineer. There's no need to have previous experience with our stack if you are willing to learn.
• Fluent in English.

Nice to have

• Previously developed some native apps in Android (ideally in Kotlin).
• Speak French

You might be a good fit if you

• Reflexively ask yourself, “is this code the best way to make my users happy?”
• Appreciate our dedication to 'ruthless prioritization,' where the ability to swiftly pivot projects based on new information is valued. 
• Want to learn to solve hard problems and aren’t afraid to ask for help when you get stuck.
• Are excited to learn about complex systems.
• Can communicate clearly with colleagues who work, speak and think differently.
• Work to make things easier for the next engineer who will touch your code.
• Always try to improve as a programmer and colleague.
• Are excited to deeply understand the inner workings of the tools you use.

About engineering at Wave

• You'll join an autonomous, cross-functional and diverse team focused on a single area of Wave's product. Each team is led by a Product Manager and an Engineering Manager.
• We organize projects to give you as much ownership as possible. Typically, you'll be responsible for a feature or improvement end-to-end, from design through deployment.
• Our stack (note that we will train you on any of these—you don't need any prior experience):
  • backend: Python 3 (+ mypy)
  • API layer: GraphQL
  • android frontend: Kotlin/Jetpack
  • iOS frontend: Swift/SwiftUI
  • web frontend: TypeScript/React
  • database: Postgres
  • infrastructure: GCP / Terraform
  • orchestration: Kubernetes

Our team

• We have a rapidly growing in-country team in Senegal, Côte D'Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, Gambia, and Uganda, plus remote team members spread across the world.
• We're deeply passionate about our mission of bringing radically affordable financial services to the people who need them most.
• We foster autonomy for our employees. You'll own your projects at every stage, from understanding the problem to monitoring your solution in production.
• We raised the largest Series A in Africa in 2021. Our world-class investors, include Founders Fund, Sequoia Heritage, Stripe, Ribbit Capital, Y Combinator, and Partech Africa.
• In 2022, we were on Y Combinator's top 50 companies by revenue.