Site Reliability Engineer

How you’ll help us achieve it

As a Site Reliability Engineer at Wave, you will be responsible for ensuring our systems are highly reliable, scalable, and performant to support our rapid growth. You will design, implement, and maintain robust infrastructure and tools to handle millions of transactions daily across multiple countries.

Key focus areas include:

• Improving system observability through metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting
• Optimizing performance and efficiency of backend services and databases
• Automating cloud and datacenter operations and promoting infrastructure-as-code best practices
• Collaborating with product teams to proactively improve the reliability of our services
• Participating in and improving our on-call incident response processes
• Championing security and compliance in our infrastructure

In this role, you will have the opportunity to tackle exciting challenges, such as:

• Scaling our ledger to handle 10x transaction volume
• Ensuring 99.99% uptime for payment processing despite unreliable infrastructure and communications
• Kepping costs stable while we scale
• Detecting and blocking fraud in real-time at a massive scale
• Securely storing, transferring, and encrypting sensitive financial data
• Enabling instant money transfers for millions of users across several countries
• Leading or being involved in the resolution of complex incidents and problems

Key Details

• You can work remotely from anywhere (between UTC -1 and +3) with reliable Internet access.
• Wave covers travel once per year to one of our operating countries in Africa, as well as a yearly stipend of $800 to meet with coworkers.
• 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.
• Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, we are offering a salary of up to $144,000 (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.

Requirements

• 4+ years of experience in an SRE or DevOps role
• Solid understanding of networking, distributed systems, and database concepts
• Track record of successfully implementing observability, CI/CD, and other SRE best practices
• Strong experience with cloud platforms (GCP preferred), Kubernetes, Terraform
• Proficiency in at least one backend language, preferably Python
• Ability to debug and optimize complex systems
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills
• Passion for our mission of bringing financial services to underserved markets

Bonus points for:

• Experience supporting high-volume transactional systems in the finance/payments domain
• Familiarity with our tech stack (Postgres, Redis, GraphQL, Android/iOS)
• Knowledge of security and compliance standards for financial services
• Contributions to open-source projects or infrastructure community

You might be a good fit if you:

• 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

About engineering at Wave

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