Engineering Manager-Database Reliability

Wave

15h • $227,900 • Remote

About The Position

Wave is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead the database reliability team. This role is crucial for ensuring Wave's databases are highly available and scalable to meet the demands of a rapidly growing user base. As a critical financial infrastructure provider, maintaining a reliable and secure platform is a top priority. The Engineering Manager will support engineers in architecting and maintaining database technologies, mentor a global team, refine operational processes like incident response and capacity planning, and collaborate with other engineering teams. The role also involves driving best practices for monitoring, cost optimization, and performance tuning for databases like Postgres and CockroachDB, as well as hiring and growing the team to shape Wave's DB reliability culture.

Requirements

• At least five years of experience as a manager supporting database or storage teams.
• In a timezone between GMT-1 and GMT+3.
• Willing to travel to Africa once per year for ~6 days (Wave covers all costs).
• 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.
• 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.

Nice To Haves

• Care a lot about working on software whose mission you believe in.
• Want to be part of an engineering culture that values simple and straightforward architecture over cutting-edge shiny tech.
• Want to work on a team where it’s easy to collaborate.
• Enjoy solving complex performance and reliability challenges in large-scale database systems.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Benefits

• Yearly $1,200 stipend to support coworking meetups with teammates.
• Subsidized health insurance for you and your dependents.
• Retirement contributions.
• 6 months of fully paid parental leave.
• Subsidized fertility assistance.
• Flexible vacation, with most folks taking between 21-30 days exclusive of statutory holidays.
• $10,000 annual charitable donation matching.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed