Product Engineer (Android)

Wave; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 98,000 - 117,000; Full time

Job summary

A financial technology company is seeking an experienced engineer to build and enhance Android applications for financial services. The ideal candidate has 5+ years of professional experience, with proficiency in Kotlin and Jetpack Compose. This is a fully remote role, offering competitive salaries and benefits, including equity packages and annual stipends.

Benefits

Yearly $1,200 stipend for coworking meetups

Subsidised health insurance

6 months paid parental leave

Flexible vacation policy

$10,000 annual charitable donation matching

Qualifications

• Minimum of 5 years of professional experience with 2 years in Android applications.
• Experience with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose in a published app.
• Fluent in English, French is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Build and improve the ways people pay and access money.
• Collaborate with Product to design features for internal teams.
• Drive technical design discussions.

Skills

Android application development

Kotlin

Jetpack Compose

User feedback investigation

Technical design discussion

Education

5 years of professional experience

Tools

Python 3

GraphQL

Postgres

GCP

Kubernetes

Job description

Our mission

We’re making Africa the first cashless continent.

In 2017, over half the population in Sub‑Saharan Africa had no bank account. That was because the fees were too high, the closest branch could be miles away, and nobody accepted cards. Without access to financial institutions, people were forced to keep their savings under the mattress. Small business owners relied on lenders who charged extortionate rates. Parents spent hours waiting in line to pay school fees in cash.

We’re 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.

Our goal is to make Africa the first cashless continent and that’s where you come in…

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.

We’re looking for an engineer who’s independent and excited about getting things done. You’ll be responsible for building and improving the ways people pay and access money with Wave. You’ll take ownership of every aspect of the process, starting with a deep comprehension of the problem, collaborating with Product and Engineering managers to identify the optimal solution for our users, leading the entire life‑cycle of your project, and assisting the customer support team in resolving issues.

You’ll be joining our Field Product team, responsible for building and maintaining the tools used by our field operators to drive user growth.

Our to‑do list changes constantly, but here are some recent projects:

• Improved geo‑localisation of merchants.
• Re‑design of the Field App to match field operators behaviour.
• Supporting new country launches.
• Consolidating field operators on the same application.
• Improving permission management.

In this role you’ll:

• Collaborate with Product to design and build features for the tools used by our internal field operations teams.
• Investigate user feedback and resolve system bugs.
• Drive technical design discussions and direction.
• Actively pair with others and perform code reviews.
• Work closely with other Android engineers in the company to improve the way we do things.

Key Details

• This is a fully remote role. Candidates must be based in one of our talent hub countries (UK, Spain, 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 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 $152,100 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, with most folks taking between 21‑30 days exclusive of statutory holidays.
  • $10,000 annual charitable donation matching.

Requirements

• Minimum of 5 years of professional experience with minimum 2 years of it spent building Android applications.
• Experience using Kotlin + Jetpack Compose in a published app (professional or personal projects are fine).
• Fluent in English. French is a plus.

You might be a good fit if you

• Reflexively ask yourself, “is this code the best way to make my users happy?”
• Push through hard problems without giving up.
• Enjoy helping other engineers on your team to improve their frontend skills.
• Are not afraid to take on complicated systems.
• Are excited to learn to do some amount of backend work or even branch out to doing Android work – we love folks who are keen to broaden their skill sets!
• Work to make things easier for the next engineer who will touch your code.
• Always try to improve as a programmer and colleague.

About engineering at Wave

You'll join an autonomous, cross‑functional team focused on a single area of Wave's product. Each team is led by a product manager and mentored by a technical lead on the team. You’ll be responsible for your own frontend‑focused projects as well as supporting the other engineers on your team with the frontend parts of their projects. We organise things to give you as much ownership as possible so typically you’ll be in charge of your projects from planning through to release.

Our stack (you only need prior experience with your frontend stack, if you need to work with anything else we’ll train you):

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

#LI‑VV1 #LI‑REMOTE

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.