Engineering Manager - Developer Experience

About Wave Mobile Money

Wave is revolutionizing financial services in Africa with the goal of making it the first cashless continent. Launched in 2017, Wave provides mobile money solutions that are cost-effective, instantly accessible, and usable even in areas with unreliable infrastructure. Millions of users across nine countries benefit from these services, which include easy cash deposits, withdrawals, and peer-to-peer transactions.

Role Overview

As Engineering Manager of the Developer Experience (DevEx) team, you will lead efforts to provide Wave's engineers with streamlined tools and processes to deliver high-quality features efficiently and reliably. This team balances rapid feature deployment with system reliability, critical to the millions relying on Wave for their financial needs.

Key Responsibilities

• Collaborate with senior engineers and leadership to prioritize team tasks and projects.
• Mentor and guide team members to enhance their technical skills and professional growth.
• Treat the developer platform as a product by gathering feedback, assessing adoption, and prioritizing improvements that balance developer speed with business requirements like security and compliance.
• Oversee the development lifecycle from coding to safe production deployment across multiple countries.
• Evaluate and pragmatically integrate AI-assisted development tools to optimize workflow quality and reduce repetitive work.

Why You’ll Enjoy This Role

• You are passionate about creating impactful software improving financial access for underserved populations.
• You value simplicity and reliability in engineering architecture over adopting the latest technologies.
• You thrive in a collaborative, mission-driven culture aligned on user-focused outcomes.

Job Details and Benefits

• Fully remote work from anywhere in UTC -1 to +3 time zones with reliable internet and work authorization.
• Annual one-week immersion trip to Africa covered by Wave.
• Participation in regular on-call rotations.
• Competitive compensation up to $185,800 USD or equivalent, plus substantial equity.
• Comprehensive perks including subsidized health insurance, retirement plans, 6 months paid parental leave, fertility assistance, unlimited vacation with a minimum of 20 days, and $10,000 annual charity matching.

Candidate Requirements

• Minimum three years managing developer experience or internal tooling teams.
• Work hours aligned within GMT-1 to GMT+3 timezone or willingness to adjust accordingly.
• Commitment to traveling annually to Africa for approximately six days.
• Strong engineering background, ideally with Python development experience.
• Experience treating internal developer tools as products with user feedback loops, adoption metrics, and balanced feature planning.
• Demonstrated people management skills including coaching, mentoring, and performance assessment.
• Effective project management capabilities with prioritization, deadline tracking, and inter-team communication.

Technical Expertise

• Proficient with modern CI/CD platforms such as GitHub Actions, CircleCI, or Buildkite, understanding their trade-offs.
• Knowledge of developer productivity tools including local dev environments, build systems, IDEs, dependency management, and observability tools.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes and containerized deployment processes, particularly related to deployment pipelines.
• Understanding of developer productivity metrics frameworks such as DORA, SPACE, or DX Core 4 with a clear perspective on measurement priorities.

About the DevEx Team

• Supports local development tooling for Python monolith including IDE integrations and containerized setups.
• Manages internal Python modules with attention to dependencies and security.
• Maintains CI pipelines prioritizing speed, reliability, and integration with quality gates.
• Develops AI-assisted coding tools and observability solutions such as Sentry.

Example Projects

• Migration from older CI platforms to GitHub Actions with namespace management.
• Development of deployment visualizations for multi-country hybrid infrastructure.
• Implementation of safeguards and background agents for secure use of AI tools in development.

Engineering Culture and Tech Stack

• Focus on simple, predictable systems and deeply understanding technology.
• Persistent and progressive improvement mindset.
• Current technologies include Python 3 backend, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, GCP, Redis, GraphQL APIs, and frontends in Kotlin, Swift, and React.

Team and Mission

• A rapidly expanding team across multiple African countries and globally remote members.
• A shared commitment to making financial services accessible and affordable.
• Highly autonomous work environment with ownership from problem definition to production monitoring.
• Backed by leading investors and featured among top revenue-generating companies in Africa.

Equal Opportunity

Wave values diversity and inclusiveness, welcoming applicants from all backgrounds to contribute to their transformative mission.