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 six 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
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 lifecycle of your project, and assisting the customer support team in resolving issues.
Our to-do list is always evolving, but here are some recent projects:
- Allowing people to access their money cross-border in West Africa.
- 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.
- Enabling people to start accepting Wave payments for their business by signing up within an app.
- Allowing people to pay for their transportation on taxis, trains & buses.
Key Details
- You can work remotely from anywhere (between UTC -5 and +4) with reliable internet access.
- Wave covers travel once per year to one of our operating countries in Africa, as well as a yearly stipend of $800 to meet with coworkers.
- 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 $144,000 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 30-40 days per year.
- $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.
Nice to have
- Kotlin Coroutines & Flows knowledge.
- Understanding of design patterns like MVVM.
- Apollo Kotlin experience.
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.
- Enjoy helping other engineers on your team to improve their frontend skills.
- Are excited to learn to do some amount of backend work where it is closely tied to larger frontend projects.
About engineering at Wave
- You'll join an autonomous, cross-functional and diverse team focused on a single area of Wave's product. Each team is led by a Product Manager and an Engineering Manager.
- 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 organize 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 (+ mypy)
- API layer: GraphQL
- android frontend: Kotlin/Jetpack Compose
- iOS frontend: Swift/SwiftUI
- web frontend: TypeScript/React
- database: Postgres
- infrastructure: GCP / Terraform
- orchestration: Kubernetes
- We have a rapidly growing in-country team in Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, and Uganda, 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.
- In 2023, we were on Y Combinator's top 50 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.
Top Skills
What We Do
We're making Africa the first cashless continent.
In 2017, nearly 60% of adults 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 November 2017, we launched a mobile app in Senegal for cash deposit, withdrawal, and peer-to-peer and business payments. In 2019, we expanded to Cote D'Ivoire. Now, we have millions of users and are growing fast.
Our goal is to drive financial inclusion and make Africa the first cashless continent
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