[Hiring] Engineering Manager-Database Reliability @Wave

Role Description

Wave is now the largest financial institution in Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire, with millions of users, growing rapidly year-on-year. You’ll lead the database reliability team, which ensures that Wave’s databases are as “always up” as possible and can scale as our user base grows. Database reliability is critical to Wave for two reasons:

• We’re one of the fastest-growing financial services ever, which causes a steady stream of new scalability challenges.
• We’ve become critical infrastructure for many of our users—if we go down, they can’t access their money.

As an engineering manager, you will:

• Support the engineers in architecting, maintaining and evolving reliable, high-performance database technologies across multiple environments.
• Mentor and coach a diverse, globally distributed team of DB engineers.
• Shape and refine processes like incident response, postmortems, and capacity planning to ensure smooth ops.
• Collaborate with infrastructure, product, and security teams on platform database initiatives.
• Drive best practices for monitoring, cost optimisation, and performance tuning in Postgres, CockroachDB and any future database we adopt.
• Hire and grow the team as needed, shaping Wave’s DB reliability culture and standards.

Qualifications

• At least five years of experience as a manager supporting database or storage teams.
• Demonstrable people management experience: coaching, performance evaluation, mentorship, and career development.
• Relevant project management experience: specifically prioritisation, tracking schedules and deadlines, communicating across team/org boundaries.
• Experience managing process design: running a smooth on call rotation, incident response, postmortems, load testing, capacity planning, etc.
• Hiring experience: predicting staffing needs, designing interview loops, evaluating candidates, assisting with closing candidates at offer stage.

Requirements

• Timezone between GMT-1 and GMT+3.
• Willingness to travel to Africa once per year for ~6 days (Wave covers all costs).
• Proven track record of running mission-critical databases in production (replication, backups, migrations, HA/DR).
• Skilled with Kubernetes and container orchestration (experience running DB workloads in K8s is a bonus).
• Experience working in Cloud (preferably GCP) or Data Center infrastructure.

Benefits

• Yearly $1,200 stipend to support coworking meetups with teammates.
• 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.

About the Database Reliability Team

The Database Reliability teams’ scope includes:

• Building tooling to observe and debug outages and performance problems.
• Hardening Wave’s backend to be more resilient to incidents.
• Enabling product teams to discover and fix reliability/performance issues in code they own.
• Responding to incidents, analyzing postmortems, and prioritizing the resulting action items.

Some recent projects, as examples of specific things the team has worked on:

• Scale our databases to handle 10x load.
• Automate backup, disaster recovery, and several maintenance operations.
• Migrate to CockroachDB.

About engineering at Wave

• We care about the big picture.
• We move as fast as possible.
• We like boring technology.
• Simplicity is a strategy.

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.