Performance Engineer

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 9 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 

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 Wave's first Performance Engineer, you will establish performance engineering across our Python monolith, GraphQL API, Postgres and CockroachDB databases, and cloud infrastructure. You will tackle challenges related to optimising system performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency for systems serving tens of millions of users across multiple countries.

You’ll work within the Platform group and report to the Director of Platform. And you will lay the foundation of performance engineering at Wave by building tooling, processes, and best practices used by all of Wave's engineers, with the potential to grow this into a dedicated team, offering a chance to shape our technical future.

In this role you’ll:

• Design, build, and operate Wave’s performance engineering function from the ground up, defining strategy, tooling, and processes for performance testing and optimisation.
• Profile and analyse production performance, using observability and debugging tools to identify bottlenecks across application code, database queries, caching, networking, and infrastructure.
• Partner with and mentor backend developers and database engineers to design and roll out performance improvements, including code optimisations, query tuning, caching strategies, and architecture changes.
• Improve our observability stack for performance signals by creating metrics, traces, profiling, and alerting to help teams understand system behaviour under load.
• Develop and maintain load, stress, and scalability testing frameworks to evaluate the performance of our backend monolith, GraphQL APIs, and Postgres/CockroachDB-backed workloads.

Examples of challenges you may work on:

• Ensuring our monolith and database can safely support the expected user growth (4x in the next 3 years).
• Building internal tooling for self-service and automated load testing of critical API and database code paths.
• Using profiling and observability to reduce the latency of key GraphQL queries and make the tooling readily available to all engineers.
• Identifying performance regressions early and making them visible across engineering.
• Creating performance guidelines and training materials for backend engineers.
• Create automated performance testing in CI/CD to ensure every significant change is evaluated for throughput, latency, and resource efficiency.

Key Details

• This is a fully remote role. Candidates must be based in one of our talent hub countries (UK, Spain, USA, Canada, Kenya and Ghana) or in one of our operating markets in Africa including Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, or Burkina Faso.
• Remote team members are expected to travel to our operational markets (e.g. Senegal or Côte d'Ivoire) at least once a year. Exceptions apply, but we’ve found this key to understanding our users and product.
• Wave provides a yearly $1,200 stipend to support coworking meetups with teammates.
• Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, depending on your level and location, we offer a salary of up to $222,700 USD (paid in your local currency equivalent), plus a generous equity package. 
• 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 21-30 days exclusive of statutory holidays.
• $10,000 annual charitable donation matching.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in performance engineering, SRE, or systems optimisation.
• Deep proficiency in Python performance analysis and optimisation.
• Deep understanding of Postgres performance, SQL optimisation, indexing, and query execution.
• Experience with GraphQL performance.
• Experience building internal performance tooling or platforms that other engineers use
• Track record of measurable performance improvements (reduced latency, lower costs, improved throughput)
• Demonstrated expertise in performance testing, load testing, profiling, and optimisation of backend services and databases.
• Strong programming skills in more than one programming language (Python preferred as one of them).
• Solid understanding of networking, distributed systems, and caching strategies.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills. This role will succeed by enabling product engineers to create more performant code.

You might be a good fit if you 

• Always ask: “Is this code the best way to delight users?”
• Love tackling hard problems and asking for help when needed
• Enjoy understanding complex systems
• Communicate clearly with people from different backgrounds
• Write clean, maintainable code with future engineers in mind
• Seek continuous growth as both engineer and collaborator
• Are curious about the tools you use and how they work

Our team

• We have a rapidly growing in-country team in Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Uganda, Niger, Sierra Leone, and Cameroon 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.
• We are on Y Combinator's top companies by revenue.

How to apply

Fill out the form below, and 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.

Wave is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.