Wave-posted 3 days ago
Full-time • Mid Level
Remote
101-250 employees

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 9 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 Wave is now the largest financial institution in Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire, with millions of users, growing rapidly year-on-year. And, we’re still in the early days of our product roadmap and potential impact on people’s everyday lives. As Wave's first Performance Engineer, you will establish performance engineering across our Python monolith, GraphQL API, Postgres and CockroachDB databases, and cloud infrastructure. You will tackle challenges related to optimising system performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency for systems serving tens of millions of users across multiple countries. You’ll work within the Platform group and report to the Director of Platform. And you will lay the foundation of performance engineering at Wave by building tooling, processes, and best practices used by all of Wave's engineers, with the potential to grow this into a dedicated team, offering a chance to shape our technical future.

  • Design, build, and operate Wave’s performance engineering function from the ground up, defining strategy, tooling, and processes for performance testing and optimisation.
  • Profile and analyse production performance, using observability and debugging tools to identify bottlenecks across application code, database queries, caching, networking, and infrastructure.
  • Partner with and mentor backend developers and database engineers to design and roll out performance improvements, including code optimisations, query tuning, caching strategies, and architecture changes.
  • Improve our observability stack for performance signals by creating metrics, traces, profiling, and alerting to help teams understand system behaviour under load.
  • Develop and maintain load, stress, and scalability testing frameworks to evaluate the performance of our backend monolith, GraphQL APIs, and Postgres/CockroachDB-backed workloads.
  • Create automated performance testing in CI/CD to ensure every significant change is evaluated for throughput, latency, and resource efficiency.
  • 7+ years of experience in performance engineering, SRE, or systems optimisation.
  • Deep proficiency in Python performance analysis and optimisation.
  • Deep understanding of Postgres performance, SQL optimisation, indexing, and query execution.
  • Experience with GraphQL performance.
  • Experience building internal performance tooling or platforms that other engineers use
  • Track record of measurable performance improvements (reduced latency, lower costs, improved throughput)
  • Demonstrated expertise in performance testing, load testing, profiling, and optimisation of backend services and databases.
  • Strong programming skills in more than one programming language (Python preferred as one of them).
  • Solid understanding of networking, distributed systems, and caching strategies.
  • Excellent communication and collaboration skills. This role will succeed by enabling product engineers to create more performant code.
  • Always ask: “Is this code the best way to delight users?”
  • Love tackling hard problems and asking for help when needed
  • Enjoy understanding complex systems
  • Communicate clearly with people from different backgrounds
  • Write clean, maintainable code with future engineers in mind
  • Seek continuous growth as both engineer and collaborator
  • Are curious about the tools you use and how they work
  • 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.
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