Job description
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 an experienced iOS 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 iOS 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 all over Senegal.
- 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 -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 $1200 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.
- Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, depending on your level and location, we offer a salary of up to $152,100 USD, 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 21-30 days exclusive of statutory holidays.
- $10,000 annual charitable donation matching.
Requirements
- Minimum of 5 years of professional experience with a minimum of 2 years of it spent building iOS applications.
- Experience using Swift and SwiftUI (professional or personal projects are fine).
- Native or fluent English.
You might be a good fit if you
- Reflexively ask yourself, “is this code the best way to make my users happy?”
- Push through hard problems without giving up.
- Enjoy helping other engineers on your team to improve their frontend skills.
- Are not afraid to take on complicated systems.
- Are excited to learn to do some amount of backend work or even branch out to doing Android work - we love folks who are keen to broaden their skill sets!
- 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 mentored by a technical lead on the team.
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
- 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.
- We are on Y Combinator’s top 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.
