Junior Software Engineer

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 now the largest financial institution in Senegal, with over 7 million users. And, we’re still in the early days of our product roadmap and potential impact on people’s everyday lives.

We’re looking for a junior engineer who is eager to grow their skills, good at asking for help when they’re stuck, and a strong communicator and Independent. You'll be responsible for building and improving the ways people pay with Wave. You'll own every step of the process, from understanding the problem to shipping your solution to users to helping the customer support team resolve problems.

In this role you'll;

Be directly embedded in a Product team focusing on online payments through Wave.
Interacting directly with Wave partners to support and create integrations with Wave.
Contribute to a full-stack codebase. We have web portals built on typescript/react, backend in Python, and mobile apps using Kotlin & Swift.
Take lots of ownership and accountability in implementing improvements. We'd love to see you grow into being able to be handed a problem, and for you to devise the design, implementation, and follow-up after shipping.
Work with our Postgres database. Analyzing our data models, and helping generate analytics and insights to help your Product Manager make better decisions.

Our to-do list changes constantly, but here are some recent projects:

Allowing people to pay their electricity bills with Wave by integrating with Senelec, the national electrical utility.
Building an app for business owners to pay their employees' salaries using Wave.
Writing reliability systems that make Wave robust by automatically detecting outages with partners, and toggling features with Wave to maximize good UX.

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 nearby to your home location.
Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, depending on your experience, we offer a salary range of up to $104,600 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.

Requirements

1 year of professional experience as a software engineer, with some understanding of python.
- Alternatively being an active contributor in an open source project.
Fluency in English. French is a plus.

You might be a good fit if you

Reflexively ask yourself, is this code the best way to make my users happy?
Are excited to understand the inner workings of the tools you use deeply.
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.

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.
We organize projects to give you as much ownership as possible. Typically, you'll be responsible for a feature or improvement end-to-end, from design through deployment. As a junior, you’ll likely pair with a more senior engineer frequently.
Our stack (note that we will train you on any of these you don't need any prior experience except for python):

backend: Python 3 (+ mypy)
API layer: GraphQL
android frontend: Kotlin/Jetpack
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, The 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 raised the largest Series A in Africa in 2021. Our world-class investors, include Founders Fund, Sequoia Heritage, Stripe, Ribbit Capital, Y Combinator, and Partech Africa.
In 2023, we were on Y Combinator's top 50 companies by revenue.

How to apply

Fill out the form below, and upload a resume in English and a cover letter describing your interest in Wave and the role.

We review applications frequently and recommend that you apply to the role that most closely aligns with your skills, experience and career goals.

Wave is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.