Engineering Manager - Developer Experience

About Wave Mobile Money

Our mission is to transform Africa into the first cashless continent. In 2017, over half the population in Sub-Saharan Africa lacked bank accounts due to high fees, limited branch access, and cash-only transactions. We are tackling these challenges by providing financial services that are free of account fees, instantly accessible, and widely accepted—even in areas with unreliable infrastructure. Launched first in Senegal, our mobile app offers cash deposits, withdrawals, peer-to-peer, and business payments. We now serve millions of users across nine countries and continue to grow rapidly.

Role Overview

As the Engineering Manager leading the Developer Experience (DevEx) team, you will ensure that Wave's engineers have the essential tools and efficient processes to deliver value quickly and reliably. Developer Experience is vital to us because we are Africa's most innovative fintech, aiming to accelerate new service delivery, and because our platform supports critical financial access for many users.

Key Responsibilities

• Collaborate with senior engineers, the Director of Platform, and engineering leadership to prioritize team initiatives.
• Mentor and support team members to enhance their engineering and collaboration skills.
• Manage the developer platform as a product with internal users—conduct developer surveys, measure adoption, and prioritize based on impact while balancing engineering speed with business needs like security and compliance.
• Oversee the full development lifecycle from code initiation to safe production deployment across multiple countries.
• Assess opportunities for AI-assisted development tools and implement them when they clearly improve quality or reduce workload.

Why Join Us?

• Contribute to a mission-driven software platform that positively impacts millions of people by providing affordable, reliable mobile money services.
• Work within an engineering culture that values simplicity and reliability over flashy technologies, promoting maintainable, straightforward systems.
• Join a collaborative, mission-focused team where shared goals drive cooperation and mutual support.

Location & Benefits

• Remote work is supported globally between UTC -1 and +3 time zones with stable internet and work authorization.
• Annual fully covered one-week immersion trip to Africa.
• Participation in on-call rotation.
• Competitive salary up to $185,800 plus an attractive equity package.
• Comprehensive benefits including subsidized health insurance and retirement contributions (may vary by country), six months fully paid parental leave, subsidized fertility assistance, unlimited vacation with a minimum of 20 days, and $10,000 yearly charitable donation matching.

Required Qualifications

• Minimum three years managing internal tooling or Developer Experience teams.
• Located in or able to align working hours to a timezone between GMT-1 and GMT+3.
• Willingness to travel annually for approximately six days to Africa (all expenses covered).
• Strong software engineering background, ideally with Python.
• Experience treating internal tools as products by running surveys, measuring adoption, roadmap planning, and balancing diverse user needs.
• Proven leadership skills, including coaching, performance assessments, mentoring, and career development support.
• Project management expertise including prioritization, scheduling, and cross-team communication.

Technical Competencies

• Practical experience with modern CI/CD platforms such as GitHub Actions, CircleCI, or Buildkite, understanding tradeoffs in speed, reliability, and cost.
• Familiarity with developer productivity tools including local development environments, build systems, IDE tools, dependency management, and developer observability.
• Knowledge of Kubernetes and containerized deployments related to deployment pipelines.
• Understanding of developer experience metrics frameworks like DORA, SPACE, or DX Core 4, with clear evaluation criteria of what to measure.

DevEx Team Scope

• Developing local tools for Python monolith feature development such as IDEs, containerized environments, and seed data.
• Managing internal shared Python modules including dependencies and security updates.
• Overseeing CI pipelines to ensure speed, reliability, and quality gate compliance.
• Supporting agentic coding and developer-facing observability tools like Sentry.

Recent Projects

• Migrated from CircleCI to GitHub Actions with namespace management.
• Developed a deployment visualization UI for a complex multi-country hybrid architecture.
• Built AI tool integrations such as harnesses and background agent capabilities to safely leverage AI in development.

Engineering Culture

• Prefer simple, predictable technology solutions.
• Focus on deep understanding of tools and systems.
• Value tenacity and continuous improvement in engineering and teamwork.

Technology Stack

• Backend: Python 3 with mypy
• Monitoring & Observability: Honeycomb, Datadog, PGAnalyze
• Database: PostgreSQL
• Orchestration: Kubernetes
• Infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform, Data Centers, Terraform
• Cache: Redis
• API Layer: GraphQL
• Mobile Clients: Android using Kotlin/Jetpack and iOS using Swift/SwiftUI
• Web Frontend: TypeScript with React

Team and Culture

• Growing in-country teams across multiple African countries plus remote global team members.
• Passionate about providing affordable financial services to underserved populations.
• Encourage employee autonomy with ownership over projects from problem definition to production monitoring.
• Backed by top investors including Founders Fund, Sequoia Heritage, Stripe, Ribbit Capital, Y Combinator, and Partech Africa.
• Ranked as one of Y Combinator's top revenue-generating companies.

Application Process

Please submit your resume in English along with a cover letter detailing your interest in Wave and this role. Applications are reviewed regularly, so we encourage applying to roles that best match your skills and career aspirations.

Diversity and Inclusion

Wave is proud to be an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace for all employees.