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 November 2017, we launched a mobile app in Senegal for cash deposit, withdrawal, and peer-to-peer and business payments.
In 2019, we expanded to Cote d'Ivoire. Now, we have millions of users 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
We’re looking for an experienced Android engineer who’s independent, excited about getting things done and ready to hit the ground running. You'll be responsible for building and improving the ways people pay with Wave. You'll use your Android expertise to create user-friendly and maintainable applications and to help the rest of your team do the same.
Our to-do list changes constantly, but here are some recent projects:
- Enabling people to use their Wave app to pay for products in stores.
- Allowing people to pay their electricity bills with Wave, by integrating with electrical utility companies.
- Allowing our users to cheaply send money to Wave users in other countries.
- Building a way for people to easily move money between their bank account and their Wave account.
Key Details
- You can work remotely from anywhere (between UTC -5 and +4) 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.
- Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, depending on your experience and location, we offer a salary range of 138,400-160,100 USD (or local 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 a 20-day minimum requirement
- $10,000 annual charitable donation matching
You might be a good fit if you
- Reflexively ask yourself, “is this code the best way to make my users happy?”.
- Want to learn to solve hard problems, and aren’t afraid to ask for help when you get stuck.
- Are excited to learn about complex systems.
- Can communicate clearly with colleagues who work, speak and think differently.
- Work to make things easier for the next engineer who will touch your code.
- Always try to improve as a programmer and colleague.
- Enjoy helping other engineers on your team to improve their frontend skills.
- Are excited to learn to do some amount of backend work where it is closely tied to larger frontend projects.
Requirements
- Minimum of 5 years professional experience with minimum 2 years of it spent building Android applications.
- Experience using Kotlin + Jetpack Compose (professional or personal projects are fine).
- Fluent in English.
Nice to have
- Kotlin Coroutines & Flows knowledge.
- Understanding of design patterns like MVVM.
- Apollo Kotlin experience.
About engineering at Wave
You'll join an autonomous, cross-functional team focused on a single area of Wave's product. Each team is led by a Product Manager and an Engineering Manager.
You’ll be responsible for your own frontend-focused projects as well as supporting the other engineers on your team with the frontend parts of their projects. We organize things to give you as much ownership as possible so typically you'll be in charge of your projects from planning through to release.
Our stack (you only need prior experience with your frontend stack, if you need to work with anything else we’ll train you):
- backend: Python 3 (+ mypy)
- API layer: GraphQL
- Android frontend: Kotlin/Jetpack Compose
- iOS frontend: Swift/SwiftUI
- web frontend: TypeScript/React
- database: Postgres
- infrastructure: GCP / Terraform
- orchestration: Kubernetes
Our team
- We have a rapidly growing in-country team in Senegal, Côte D'Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, Gambia, and Uganda, plus remote team members spread across the world. We're deeply passionate about our mission of bringing radically affordable financial services to the people who need them most.
- We foster autonomy for our employees. You'll own your projects at every stage, from understanding the problem to monitoring your solution in production.
- We’re backed by world-class investors, including Founders Fund, Sequoia Heritage, Stripe, Ribbit Capital, Y Combinator, and Partech Africa.
How to apply
Fill out the form below, and upload a resume in English.
Please add a cover letter describing your interest in Wave and the role.
Wave is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.