Configuration Engineer

The Wave; Remote; GBP 113,000 - 134,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading technology company is seeking a Database Engineering Manager to support a team responsible for high-performance database technologies, mentoring engineers, and shaping the company's database reliability culture. This role involves collaboration with various teams and driving best practices for database performance. The ideal candidate will have at least five years of management experience, strong people management skills, and a background in cloud infrastructure. A competitive salary of up to $178,200 USD is offered, along with benefits and a positive impact on underserved communities.

Benefits

Yearly stipend for coworking meetups

Competitive salaries based on transparent formulas

Subsidized health insurance

Paid parental leave

Charitable donation matching

Qualifications

• At least five years of experience as a manager supporting database or storage teams.
• Demonstrable people-management experience including coaching and mentorship.
• Experience managing process design such as incident response and capacity planning.

Responsibilities

• Support engineers in maintaining high-performance database technologies.
• Mentor and coach a distributed team of DB engineers.
• Collaborate on platform database initiatives.

Skills

Database management

People management

Cloud infrastructure

Project management

Kubernetes

Tools

Postgres

CockroachDB

GCP

Terraform

Kubernetes

Job description

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, postmortems, 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.

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

We care a lot about working on software whose mission you believe in. Working at 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 lots of underserved people.

Company Culture

• We 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.
• We want to work on a team where it’s easy to collaborate. Our mission‑focused culture ensures that everyone you 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.
• We enjoy solving complex performance and reliability challenges in large‑scale database systems.

Team Scope

• 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 postmortems, and prioritizing the resulting action items.

Recent Projects

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

Qualifications

• 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 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, postmortems, 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).
• Experience working in Cloud (preferably GCP) or Data Center infrastructure.

Benefits & Perks

• 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.
• 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: subsidised health insurance for you and your dependents and retirement contributions (both vary from country to country), 6 months of fully paid parental leave and subsidised fertility assistance, flexible vacation (most folks take between 21‑30 days exclusive of statutory holidays), $10,000 annual charitable donation matching.