Performance Engineer

Wave

12h•Remote

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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.

Nice To Haves

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

Responsibilities

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.

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 21-30 days exclusive of statutory holidays.
$10,000 annual charitable donation matching.

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