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...
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.
As a Lead Datacenter Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in supporting our existing datacenter footprint and enabling future growth. You will be responsible for both the operational management and architectural design of our datacenter infrastructure across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Key responsibilities include:
- Designing and deploying distributed micro-datacenter sites, each comprising 1–2 racks, ensuring scalability and reliability.
- Managing on-premises infrastructure, coordinating remote hands, and troubleshooting issues to maintain high uptime.
- Owning vendor relationships, overseeing hardware procurement, and planning logistics to support expansion.
- Developing automation tooling and monitoring systems for availability, capacity planning, and performance optimization.
- Defining and implementing support processes, including incident response protocols and participation in on-call rotations.
- Integrating hybrid cloud models into the physical infrastructure strategy, ensuring seamless operation across environments.
- Collaborating cross-functionally with platform, and security teams to ensure a cohesive infrastructure development.
In this role, you will have the opportunity to tackle exciting challenges, such as:
- Scaling a lightweight, cost-effective datacenter strategy to support rapid growth across diverse geographies.
- Maintaining high availability despite local infrastructure challenges, ensuring consistent service delivery.
- Standardizing tooling and automation across physical and hybrid cloud environments to streamline operations.
- Establishing internal standards and best practices for datacenter operations in a rapidly evolving infrastructure landscape.
- You can work remotely from anywhere (between UTC -1 and +3) with reliable Internet access.
- Willingness to travel up to 50% of the time during the first 12 months, depending on datacenter launches and operational reviews. Frequent travel is expected in the first year, with flexibility for continued travel as needed (Wave covers travel costs).
- Wave covers immersion trip travel once per year to one of our operating countries in Africa, as well as a yearly stipend of $1200 to meet with coworkers (immersion trip travel is separate to work related travel mentioned above).
- 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.
- This role involves participating in an on-call rotation. When you’re on call you’ll carry a pager (just an app installed on your phone; we use PagerDuty for this), and in case an incident happens on your watch, you’ll be expected to be able to start troubleshooting within 15 minutes
- Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, we are offering a salary of up to $167,000 USD (paid in your local currency equivalent), 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 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.
- Strong networking knowledge, particularly in Layer 2/3 protocols, routing, and switching.
- Hands-on experience with datacenter hardware, including rack installations, power management, and environmental controls.
- Proven track record in vendor engagement, hardware procurement, and site commissioning.
- Demonstrated ability to define internal standards and propose platform/tooling stacks from scratch.
- Experience in integrating hybrid cloud models into existing infrastructure.
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to mentor junior engineers and collaborate across teams.
- Knowledge of Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) tools for monitoring and managing datacenter resources.
- Good grasp of security best practices and compliance standards for financial services
- Proficiency in Python scripting, particularly for automation, infrastructure orchestration, and tooling development.
- Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Azure, especially in hybrid environments.
- Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform or Ansible.
- Exposure to containerization and orchestration technologies, including Docker and Kubernetes.
- Understanding of security best practices and compliance standards relevant to datacenter operations.
- Experience with monitoring and observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, or Datadog.
- Care a lot about working on software whose mission you can believe in
- Have a bias for action. You see a problem, you fix a problem. You get buy-in for your solutions and keep tickets moving
- Have a growth mindset and a willingness to use your skills and experience to mentor less-experienced engineers
- Have the desire to learn from others and make yourself better every day
- Are excited to build world-class infrastructure that powers economic opportunity for an entire continent
We value:
- Boring technology
- Simple, predictable designs
- Deeply understanding our tools and systems
- Being tenacious in the face of tricky problems
- Constantly trying to improve as engineers and colleagues
Our stack (note that we will train you on any of these—you don't need prior experience—and you probably won't work much/at all with the frontend parts):
- Infrastructure: GCP / Terraform
- Orchestration: Kubernetes
- Database: Postgres
- Cache: Redis
- Backend: Python 3 (+ mypy)
- API layer: GraphQL
- Android frontend: Kotlin/Jetpack
- iOS frontend: Swift/SwiftUI
- Web frontend: TypeScript/React
#LI-REMOTE #LI-DH1
- 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.
- We are on Y Combinator's top companies by revenue.
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.
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