Performance Engineer

The Wave; Remote; GBP 134,000 - 167,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading financial institution is seeking a Performance Engineer to establish performance engineering across their Python-based systems, API, and databases. You will define strategies, mentor developers, and optimize system performance for millions of users. This fully remote role offers a salary up to $222,700 USD, plus equity and generous benefits. Ideal candidates will have proven experience in performance analysis and a passion for solving complex engineering challenges.

Benefits

Yearly $1,200 stipend for coworking meetups

Generous equity package

Subsidized health insurance

Flexible vacation

$10,000 annual donation matching

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in performance engineering, SRE, or systems optimisation.
• Deep proficiency in Python performance analysis and optimisation.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate performance engineering functions.
• Profile and analyze production performance using observability tools.
• Mentor backend developers on performance improvements.

Skills

Performance engineering

Python performance analysis

Postgres performance

SQL optimisation

GraphQL performance

Load testing

Communication skills

Collaboration

Job description

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.

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Qualifications

• 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).
• 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.
• 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.

Benefits

• 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.
• 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.

Working Conditions

• 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.