Engineering Manager (Prod Finance & Compliance Team)

Our mission

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 six 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 growing in terms of the countries we’re operating in and the number of users we’re serving. In a compliance-sensitive industry, this means that we’re working with more jurisdictions, and our systems need to serve more users in a greater variety of situations. To help us prepare for this growth, we’re building more flexible and scalable systems for checking IDs, screening users, understanding account ownership, monitoring transactions, and complying with all other local laws and regulations while causing the minimum disruption to our users.

As Engineering Manager, you will lead our Prod Finance and Compliance team (up to six engineers), which builds and maintains systems related to compliance requirements, including KYC, AML, watchlist screening, account limits, and systems that support our treasury and accounting teams. You will work closely with our Finance and Compliance PM and two data analysts to build and maintain the systems that will help us build reliable, customer-friendly compliance systems for the long term.

In this role, you'll:

• Collaborate with the product manager to prioritize and scope work.
• Support and mentor your teammates to become more effective engineers and colleagues.
• Design and implement processes (e.g. status updates, reflection and learning, team bonding) that allow the team to operate smoothly.
• Ensure that technical approaches align with business needs.
• Create and maintain a positive and collaborative team culture and work environment.

Key Details

• You can work remotely from anywhere (between UTC -1 and +3) with reliable Internet access.
• You’re willing to travel to one of our key markets once per year for ~6 days (Wave covers all costs). We also provide a yearly stipend of $800 to meet with coworkers.
• We run performance reviews twice a year and award bonuses or promotions to exceptional performers who have been with the company for more than six months.
• Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, we are offering a salary of up to $166,900 USD ((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 of 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.

You might be a good fit if you

• You care a lot about working on software whose mission you believe in. Working at Wave positively impacts millions of lives through fast and cheap mobile money services. By helping us build a best-in-class customer service experience, you’ll have a big impact on the lives of lots of underserved people.
• You want to be part of an engineering culture that values simple and straightforward architecture over cutting-edge shiny tech. This helps us keep Wave simple to operate and makes it easier to achieve our reliability goals.
• You are excited to build a team culture that’s positive and collaborative, and to help the engineers level up and advance their careers.
• You have experience with our stack (Python backend, postgres database, SQL based accounting tool, simple template-based and react-based web frontends).

Requirements

• Fluent in English.
• At least one year of experience managing a software engineering team.
• Experience working on a compliance focussed team at some point in your career.
• You have demonstrable people management experience: coac