Engineering Manager - DevEx

About Wave

Wave is working toward a future where Africa becomes the first fully cashless continent. The company builds mobile money and financial tools that are simple to use, affordable, and available where traditional banking is hard to access. Since launching in Senegal in 2017, Wave has expanded to millions of users across 9 countries.

Role Summary

As the Engineering Manager for Developer Experience, you will lead the team responsible for the tools, systems, and processes that help Wave engineers deliver safely and quickly. The role focuses on improving developer productivity while balancing speed, reliability, compliance, security, and incident prevention.

What You Will Do

• Work with senior engineers, the Director of Platform, and engineering leaders to decide team priorities.
• Coach and support teammates so they grow as engineers and as collaborators.
• Run the developer platform like an internal product by gathering feedback, measuring usage, and prioritizing work based on impact.
• Shape the full development workflow, from local coding through to safe production releases across multiple countries.
• Assess AI-assisted development tools thoughtfully and adopt them only when they clearly reduce manual effort or improve quality.

Why This Role May Appeal to You

• You want your work to support a mission that improves the lives of millions through faster and lower-cost financial services.
• You value straightforward, dependable architecture over trendy technology choices.
• You enjoy collaborating across teams in a mission-driven environment where people are aligned around user impact.

Team Scope

The DevEx team works on local development tooling for Wave’s Python monolith, lifecycle management for shared Python modules, CI pipeline performance and reliability, agentic coding tools, and developer-facing observability.

Examples of Recent Work

• Migrating CI from CircleCI to GitHub Actions plus Namespace.
• Building a deployments dashboard to show releases in a multi-country hybrid setup.
• Creating harnesses, skills, and background-agent capabilities to use AI tools safely in software development.

Key Details

• This is a remote position for candidates located between UTC -1 and UTC +3, provided they have reliable internet access and work authorization.
• Once a year, you will travel to Africa for about one week; all travel expenses are covered by Wave.
• The role includes participation in an on-call rotation.
• Compensation is competitive and based on a transparent formula. Depending on experience and location, the salary can be up to $185,800 or the local equivalent, plus a strong equity package.
• Benefits include subsidized health insurance for you and your dependents, retirement contributions where applicable, 6 months of fully paid parental leave, subsidized fertility assistance, unlimited vacation with a minimum of 20 days, and $10,000 in annual charitable donation matching.

Requirements

• At least 3 years of management experience supporting internal tooling or developer experience teams.
• Availability to work in, or align to, the GMT-1 to GMT+3 timezone range.
• Willingness to travel to Africa once per year for approximately 6 days, with expenses covered by Wave.
• Strong software engineering experience, preferably in Python-based environments.
• A product-oriented approach to internal tools, including survey work, adoption measurement, roadmap planning, and balancing different user needs.
• Proven people management skills across coaching, performance reviews, mentoring, and career development.
• Project management experience covering prioritization, schedule tracking, deadline management, and cross-team communication.
• Practical experience with modern CI/CD platforms and the tradeoffs between speed, reliability, and cost.
• Experience with developer productivity tooling such as local environments, build systems, IDE support, dependency management, and developer observability.
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes and container-based deployments in pipeline environments.
• Familiarity with DORA metrics, SPACE, or DX Core 4, along with a clear view on what should and should not be measured.

About Engineering at Wave

• The team values dependable technology over unnecessary complexity.
• Work is guided by simple and predictable system design.
• Engineers are expected to understand the tools and systems they use deeply.
• Persistence and continuous improvement are important parts of the culture.

Current Technology Stack

• Backend: Python 3 with mypy in a monolith
• Monitoring and observability: Honeycomb, Datadog, PGAnalyze
• Database: Postgres
• Orchestration: Kubernetes
• Infrastructure: GCP, data centers, and Terraform
• Cache: Redis
• API layer: GraphQL
• Android frontend: Kotlin and Jetpack
• iOS frontend: Swift and SwiftUI
• Web frontend: TypeScript and React

Team and Culture

Wave has growing in-country teams across Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Uganda, Niger, Sierra Leone, and Cameroon, along with remote colleagues around the world. The company emphasizes autonomy, ownership from problem discovery through production monitoring, and a strong commitment to its mission. It also notes backing from major investors and recognition among top Y Combinator companies by revenue.

Application Notes

Applicants are asked to submit a resume in English and a cover letter explaining their interest in Wave and in this role. Wave encourages candidates to apply for the position that best matches their experience and career goals. The company is an equal-opportunity employer and supports diversity and inclusion.