Senior Analytics Engineer

Our mission is to make Africa the first cashless continent. In 2017, over half the population in Sub-Saharan Africa had no bank account due to high fees, distance to branches, and lack of card acceptance. Without access to financial institutions, people are forced to keep their savings under the mattress, and small business owners rely on lenders who charge extortionate rates. Parents spend hours waiting in line to pay school fees in cash.

We are 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.

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 and potential impact on people’s everyday lives. As a senior analytics engineer, you will work to make Wave’s data easy, safe, and reliable to use, enabling better products for our customers.

Some examples of focus areas are:

• Leading dimensional design to structure Wave’s analytics data in ways that are helpful for human and AI end users.
• Building out facts, dimensions, and One Big Tables (OBTs) as appropriate for a focus area at Wave.
• Standardizing metric creation and usage.
• Building out ways to make it easy to add context for LLMs to data models.
• Managing our extensive snowflake estate with a strong analytical mindset.
• Finding patterns that are repeated frequently and optimizing them.
• Building tools to identify and turn off stale/unused models.
• Evaluating the impact of an optimization on costs and performance.
• Building tools to improve the analytics development experience.
• Creating helpful dbt macros.
• CI/CD checks that catch possibly exploding joins.
• Reducing the pain of iterating on metric design.

Outside of the focus areas, folks in this role will also:

• Be responsible for the design, build, and health of all of our ETL pipelines.
• Champion best practice across data.
• Be a key partner in the roadmap of the data platform team.

Key details:

• This is a fully remote role. Candidates must be based in one of our talent hub countries (UK, Spain, USA (east coast), Canada (east coast), Kenya, and Ghana) or in one of our operating markets in Africa including Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, or Burkina Faso.
• Wave provides a yearly $1,200 stipend to support co-working meet-ups 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.
• 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 $123,500 - $176,400 USD, paid in your local currency equivalent plus a generous equity package.

Major benefits include:

• 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.

Requirements:

• 5+ years as an analytics or data engineer. Software engineering experience that’s focused on data platforms also counts.
• 3+ years of involved experience with Snowflake, ideally including experience with performance optimization.
• Experience with dimensional modeling, ideally having built two or more dimensional marts.
• Strong Python, SQL, and dbt experience.
• Familiarity with managing an orchestration platform like Dagster or Airflow.

You might be a good fit if you:

• Are proficient in SQL and Python.
• Are a self-starter that excels at exploring problems and collaborating closely with operations teams to drive growth through data.
• Have excellent focus, prioritizing your research and work using an iterative approach.
• Are able to compellingly present your findings to technical and non-technical audiences and make proactive recommendations based on data.
• Excel at choosing the right complexity of analysis for any given business problem.

Our team has 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, allowing you to own your projects at every stage.

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.