Engineering Manager-Database Reliability

Engineering Manager – Database Reliability

Wave is Africa’s first cashless financial platform. Since 2017, when half the population in sub‑Saharan Africa had no bank account, we built Wave to give people instant, fee‑free, and everywhere‑accepted money services. Today we serve millions of users across nine countries and keep growing.

How you\’ll help us achieve it

Wave is now the largest financial institution in Senegal, with over 7 million users, and we’re still in the early days of our product roadmap. You’ll lead the database reliability team, ensuring that Wave’s databases are “always up” and can scale as our user base grows.

Why this role matters

• We’re one of the fastest‑growing financial services ever, which causes a steady stream of new scalability challenges.
• We’ve become critical infrastructure for many users—if we go down, they can’t access their money.

Responsibilities

• Support the engineers in architecting, maintaining and evolving reliable, high‑performance database technologies across multiple environments.
• Mentor and coach a diverse, globally distributed team of DB engineers.
• Shape and refine processes like incident response, post‑mortems, and capacity planning to ensure smooth ops.
• Collaborate with infrastructure, product, and security teams on platform database initiatives.
• Drive best practices for monitoring, cost optimisation, and performance tuning in Postgres, CockroachDB and any future database we adopt.
• Hire and grow the team as needed, shaping Wave’s DB reliability culture and standards.

Our stack

• backend: Python 3 (+ mypy)
• API layer: GraphQL
• android frontend: Kotlin/Jetpack
• iOS frontend: Swift/SwiftUI
• web frontend: TypeScript/React
• database: Postgres/CockroachDB
• infrastructure: GCP/Terraform
• orchestration: Kubernetes

Key details

• This is a fully remote role. Candidates must be based in one of our talent‑hub countries (UK, Spain, Kenya, Ghana) or in one of our operating markets in Africa (Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso).
• Wave provides a yearly $1,200 stipend to support coworking meetups with teammates.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 $178,200 USD, plus a generous equity package.
• Major benefits
  • Subsidized health insurance for you and your dependents and retirement contributions (both vary by 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

• You have at least five years of experience as a manager supporting database or storage teams.
• You’re in a timezone between GMT‑1 and GMT+3.
• You’re willing to travel to Africa once per year for ~6 days (Wave covers all costs).
• You will have demonstrable people‑management experience: coaching, performance evaluation, mentorship, and career development.
• You have relevant project‑management experience: specifically prioritisation, tracking schedules and deadlines, communicating across team/org boundaries.
• You have experience managing process design: running a smooth on‑call rotation, incident response, post‑mortems, load testing, capacity planning, etc.
• You have hiring experience: predicting staffing needs, designing interview loops, evaluating candidates, assisting with closing candidates at offer stage.

Technical skills

• Proven track record of running mission‑critical databases in production (replication, backups, migrations, HA/DR).
• Skilled with Kubernetes and container orchestration (experience running DB workloads in K8s is a bonus).
• You have experience working in Cloud (preferably GCP) or Data‑Center infrastructure.

You might be a good fit if you

• Care a lot about working on software whose mission you believe in. Wave positively impacts millions of lives through fast and cheap mobile‑money services. By helping us stay reliable and scalable, you’ll have a big impact on the lives of underserved people.
• Want to be part of an engineering culture that values simple and straightforward architecture over cutting‑edge shiny tech. This helps us keep Wave simple to operate and makes it easier to achieve our reliability goals.
• Want to work on a team where it’s easy to collaborate. Our mission‑focused culture means everyone you’ll work with is here primarily for the same reason—to make our users’ lives better. That alignment makes it easy to work with anyone across the company, even if there’s some tension between your short‑term goals. This is especially helpful for teams like infrastructure that collaborate closely with many other product teams.
• Enjoy solving complex performance and reliability challenges in large‑scale database systems.

About the Database Reliability Team

The database reliability team’s scope includes:

• Building tooling to observe and debug outages and performance problems.
• Hardening Wave’s backend to be more resilient to incidents.
• Enabling product teams to discover and fix reliability/performance issues in code they own.
• Responding to incidents, analyzing post‑mortems, and prioritizing the resulting action items.

Some recent projects, as examples of specific things the team has worked on

• Scale our databases to handle 10x load.
• Automate backup, disaster recovery, and several maintenance operations.
• Migrate to CockroachDB.

About engineering at Wave

We care about the big picture. We don’t hire engineers just to ship tickets. We hire them to solve problems. That means caring deeply about outcomes, understanding context, and jumping in wherever something’s broken, even if it’s technically “not your area.” When we see problems, inefficiencies, or opportunities to make something better, we act. We dig into operational issues, clarify fuzzy product specs, or step into unfamiliar code to help unblock teammates.

We move as fast as possible. Speed matters. It lets us try things quickly, get feedback early, and course‑correct while it’s cheap. So we write small PRs. We aim for MVPs. We leave TODOs and file follow‑ups. We don’t over‑perfect v1. That said, we’re building a financial product. Some things—like money movement, correctness, or security—deserve more caution.

We like boring technology. We favor tools that are reliable, well‑understood, and easy to debug. This keeps us focused on solving meaningful problems instead of wrestling with unpredictable infrastructure. If a new technology helps us move faster, build safer, or solve a real need, we’ll consider it. But we don’t adopt tools just because they’re new—we adopt them because they’re right.

Simplicity is a strategy. It lets us focus our energy where it matters most: serving our users.

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.

Seniority level: Mid‑Senior level | Employment type: Full‑time | Job function: Engineering and Information Technology