Product Engineer

Wave; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 152,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Subsidized health insurance

Retirement contributions

Parental leave (6 months)

Fertility assistance

Flexible vacation

Charitable donation matching

Job summary

Wave is seeking a product engineer to help build and improve how users pay with Wave. You’ll own end-to-end delivery from design through deployment, collaborating with product managers, engineers, and customer support to ship reliable, scalable features.

You'll work on a range of technologies across backend, API, mobile, and web, and be comfortable moving across the stack. We expect at least five years of experience and fluency in English; French is a bonus.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional experience as a product engineer.
• Fluent in English; bilingual in French is a bonus.
• Willing to travel to operating locations at least once per year for a minimum of 6 consecutive days.

Responsibilities

• Build and improve how people pay with Wave.
• Own end-to-end delivery from design through deployment.
• Collaborate with Product Manager and Engineering Manager or Tech Lead to ship features.

Skills

Fluent in English

End-to-end delivery

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

Python

GraphQL

Kotlin

Swift

TypeScript

PostgreSQL

CockroachDB

Terraform

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’s for good reason—the fees are too high, the closest branch can be miles away, and nobody takes cards. Without access to financial institutions, people are forced to keep their savings under the mattress. Small business owners rely on lenders who charge extortionate rates. Parents spend 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 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.

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 with Wave. You’ll own every step of the process: from understanding the problem to shipping your solution to users to helping the customer support team resolve problems.

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 an Engineering Manager or Tech Lead. We organize projects to give you as much ownership as possible. Typically, you’ll be responsible for a feature or improvement end-to-end, from design through deployment.

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

• Enabling people to use their Wave app to pay for products in stores.
• Allowing people to pay their electricity bills with Wave by integrating with electrical utility companies.
• Building an app for business owners to pay their employees’ salaries using Wave.
• Allowing people to pay for their transportation on taxis, trains & buses.

Our 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 expect all engineers to be willing to work across the entire stack, including mobile. Prior experience in these technologies is a strong plus, but not required.

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.
• 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:
  • 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.

Requirements

• Minimum of 5 years of professional experience as a product engineer.
• Fluent in English, (bilingual in French is a big bonus!)
• Successful candidates must be willing to travel to one of our operating locations at least once per year for a minimum of 6 consecutive days.

You might be a good fit if you

• Reflexively ask yourself, “is this code the best way to make my users happy?”
• Want to learn to solve hard problems and aren’t afraid to ask for help when you get stuck.
• Are excited to learn about complex systems.
• Can communicate clearly with colleagues who work, speak and think differently.
• Work to make things easier for the next engineer who will touch your code.
• Always try to improve as a programmer and colleague.
• Are excited to deeply understand the inner workings of the tools you use.

About engineering at Wave

We care about the big picture. We don’t hire engineers to just ship tickets. We hire them to solve problems. That means caring deeply about outcomes, understanding context, and jumping in wherever something’s broken, even if it’s technically “not your area.” When we see problems, inefficiencies, or opportunities to make something better, we act. We dig into operational issues, clarify fuzzy product specs, or step into unfamiliar code to help unblock teammates.

We move as fast as possible. Speed matters. It lets us try things quickly, get feedback early, and course-correct while it’s cheap. So we write small PRs. We aim for MVPs. We leave TODOs and file follow-ups. We don’t over-perfect v1. That said, we’re building a financial product. Some things—like money movement, correctness, or security—deserve more caution.

We like boring technology. We favor tools that are reliable, well-understood, and easy to debug. This keeps us focused on solving meaningful problems instead of wrestling with unpredictable infrastructure. If a new technology helps us move faster, build safer, or solve a real need, we’ll consider it. But we don’t adopt tools just because they’re new—we adopt them because they’re right.

Simplicity is a strategy. It lets us focus our energy where it matters most: serving our users.

#LI-DH1 #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.

Wave is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.