Engineering Manager (Prod Finance & Compliance Team)

Wave Mobile Money, Inc.; Greater London; Remote; USD 120,000 - 167,000; Full time

Job summary

Join a pioneering financial institution on a mission to enhance mobile money services for millions. As an Engineering Manager, you will lead a talented team focused on compliance systems, ensuring our technology aligns with business needs while fostering a collaborative culture. Your expertise in backend development, particularly with Python and SQL, will drive the creation of user-friendly compliance solutions. With a commitment to a positive work environment, you'll mentor engineers and help them grow in their careers. This role offers the opportunity to make a significant impact in a rapidly expanding company that values simplicity and reliability in technology.

Benefits

Subsidized health insurance

Retirement contributions

6 months fully paid parental leave

Flexible vacation

$10,000 annual charitable donation matching

Yearly stipend for coworker meetings

Performance bonuses

Travel expenses covered for key market visits

Qualifications

• 1+ years managing a software engineering team with a focus on compliance.
• Experience with backend development, particularly in Python and SQL.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of engineers to build compliance systems including KYC and AML.
• Collaborate with product managers to prioritize and scope work.

Skills

People Management

Backend Development

SQL

Team Collaboration

Software Engineering

Compliance Knowledge

Education

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Python

Postgres

Kubernetes

GCP

Terraform

Honeycomb

Datadog

GraphQL

TypeScript

React

Job description

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 and potential impact on people’s everyday lives.

Wave is growing in terms of the countries we’re operating in and the number of users we’re serving. In a compliance-sensitive industry, this means that we’re working with more jurisdictions, and our systems need to serve more users in a greater variety of situations. To help us prepare for this growth, we’re building more flexible and scalable systems for checking IDs, screening users, understanding account ownership, monitoring transactions, and complying with all other local laws and regulations while causing the minimum disruption to our users.

As Engineering Manager, you will lead our Prod Finance and Compliance team (up to six engineers), which builds and maintains systems related to compliance requirements, including KYC, AML, watchlist screening, account limits, and systems that support our treasury and accounting teams. You will work closely with our Finance and Compliance PM and two data analysts to build and maintain the systems that will help us build reliable, customer-friendly compliance systems for the long term.

In this role, you'll:

• Collaborate with the product manager to prioritize and scope work.
• Support and mentor your teammates to become more effective engineers and colleagues.
• Design and implement processes (e.g. status updates, reflection and learning, team bonding) that allow the team to operate smoothly.
• Ensure that technical approaches align with business needs.
• Create and maintain a positive and collaborative team culture and work environment.

Key Details

• You can work remotely from anywhere (between UTC -1 and +3) with reliable Internet access.
• You’re willing to travel to one of our key markets once per year for ~6 days (Wave covers all costs). We also provide a yearly stipend of $1200 to meet with coworkers.
• We run performance reviews twice a year and award bonuses or promotions to exceptional 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, we are offering a salary of up to $166,900 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 30-40 days per year.
  • $10,000 annual charitable donation matching.

You might be a good fit if you

• You 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 build a best-in-class customer service experience, you’ll have a big impact on the lives of lots of underserved people.
• You 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.
• You are excited to build a team culture that’s positive and collaborative, and to help the engineers level up and advance their careers.
• You have experience with our stack (Python backend, postgres database, SQL based accounting tool, simple template-based and react-based web frontends).

Requirements

• Fluent in English.
• At least one year of experience managing a software engineering team.
• Experience working on a compliance focused team at some point in your career.
• You have demonstrable people management experience: coaching, performance evaluation, mentorship, career development.
• You’re comfortable with backend server development and SQL.
• You have experience managing the day to day work of an engineering team: facilitating meetings, assigning work, identifying when projects are stuck, ensuring we learn from our experience.
• You have experience working closely with a product manager to set OKRs and to scope and assign engineering tasks.

About Engineering at Wave

We value:

• Boring technology
• Simple, predictable designs
• Deeply understanding our tools and systems
• Being tenacious in the face of tricky problems
• Constantly trying to improve, as engineers and colleagues

Our current tech stack:

• Backend: Python 3 (+ mypy) monolith
• Monitoring/observability: Honeycomb, Datadog, PGAnalyze
• Database: Postgres
• Orchestration: Kubernetes
• Infrastructure: GCP/DCs/Terraform
• Networking: Wireguard, Tailscale, Palo Alto, F5
• Telephony: Flex, Asterisk, Twilio
• Cache: Redis
• Data warehouse: Snowflake
• API layer: GraphQL
• Android frontend: Kotlin/Jetpack
• iOS frontend: Swift/SwiftUI
• Web frontend: TypeScript/React