Performance 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. This was due to high fees, inaccessible branches, and lack of card acceptance. Without financial access, people stored savings at home, small businesses faced extortionate lenders, and parents spent hours in line paying school fees in cash.

Wave is solving this by building financial services that are effective: no account fees, instant availability, and universal acceptance. Even where basic infrastructure like electricity or roads are unreliable, you can still send money with Wave. Since launching a mobile app in Senegal in 2017 for cash deposit, withdrawal, and peer-to-peer/business payments, we've grown to millions of users across 9 countries. 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 currently the largest financial institution in Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire, with millions of rapidly growing users. We are still in the early stages of our product roadmap and potential impact. As Wave's first Performance Engineer, you will establish performance engineering across our Python monolith, GraphQL API, Postgres and CockroachDB databases, and cloud infrastructure. You will tackle challenges related to optimizing system performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency for systems serving tens of millions of users across multiple countries.

You’ll work within the Platform group, reporting to the Director of Platform. You will lay the foundation of performance engineering at Wave by building tooling, processes, and best practices for all engineers, with potential to grow this into a dedicated team, shaping our technical future.

In This Role You’ll

• Design, build, and operate Wave’s performance engineering function from the ground up, defining strategy, tooling, and processes for performance testing and optimisation.
• Profile and analyse production performance, using observability and debugging tools to identify bottlenecks across application code, database queries, caching, networking, and infrastructure.
• Partner with and mentor backend developers and database engineers to design and roll out performance improvements, including code optimisations, query tuning, caching strategies, and architecture changes.
• Improve our observability stack for performance signals by creating metrics, traces, profiling, and alerting to help teams understand system behaviour under load.
• Develop and maintain load, stress, and scalability testing frameworks to evaluate the performance of our backend monolith, GraphQL APIs, and Postgres/CockroachDB-backed workloads.

Examples Of Challenges You May Work On

• Ensuring our monolith and database can safely support the expected user growth (4x in the next 3 years).
• Building internal tooling for self-service and automated load testing of critical API and database code paths.
• Using profiling and observability to reduce the latency of key GraphQL queries and making the tooling readily available to all engineers.
• Identifying performance regressions early and making them visible across engineering.
• Creating performance guidelines and training materials for backend engineers.
• Creating automated performance testing in CI/CD to ensure every significant change is evaluated for throughput, latency, and resource efficiency.

Key Details

This is a fully remote Performance Engineer role. Candidates must be based in one of our talent hub countries (UK, Spain, USA, Canada, Kenya and Ghana) or in one of our operating markets in Africa (Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, or Burkina Faso). Remote team members are expected to travel to our operational markets (e.g., Senegal or Côte d'Ivoire) at least once a year, as we’ve found this essential for understanding our users and product. Wave provides a yearly $1,200 stipend to support coworking meetups with teammates. Our salaries are competitive and calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, depending on your level and location, we offer a salary of up to $222,700 USD (paid in your local currency equivalent), plus a generous equity package. Major benefits include subsidized health insurance for you and your dependents, retirement contributions (both vary by country), 6 months of fully paid parental leave, subsidized fertility assistance, flexible vacation (21-30 days plus holidays), and a $10,000 annual charitable donation matching.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in performance engineering, SRE, or systems optimisation.
• Deep proficiency in Python performance analysis and optimisation.
• Deep understanding of Postgres performance, SQL optimisation, indexing, and query execution.
• Experience with GraphQL performance.
• Experience building internal performance tooling or platforms that other engineers use.
• Track record of measurable performance improvements (reduced latency, lower costs, improved throughput).
• Demonstrated expertise in performance testing, load testing, profiling, and optimisation of backend services and databases.
• Strong programming skills in more than one programming language (Python preferred as one of them).
• Solid understanding of networking, distributed systems, and caching strategies.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, as this role succeeds by enabling product engineers to create more performant code.

You Might Be a Good Fit If You

• Always ask: “Is this code the best way to delight users?”
• Love tackling hard problems and asking for help when needed.
• Enjoy understanding complex systems.
• Communicate clearly with people from different backgrounds.
• Write clean, maintainable code with future engineers in mind.
• Seek continuous growth as both engineer and collaborator.
• Are curious about the tools you use and how they work.

Our Team

We have a rapidly growing in-country team across Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Uganda, Niger, Sierra Leone, and Cameroon, plus remote team members spread globally. We are deeply passionate about our mission of bringing radically affordable financial services to those who need them most. We foster autonomy, allowing employees to own projects from problem understanding to production monitoring. We raised Africa's largest Series A in 2021, with world-class investors including Founders Fund, Sequoia Heritage, Stripe, Ribbit Capital, Y Combinator, and Partech Africa. We are also recognized on Y Combinator's top companies by revenue list.

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 Performance Engineer role. We review applications frequently and recommend applying to the role that best aligns with your skills, experience, and career goals. Wave is an equal-opportunity employer, committed to diversity and an inclusive environment for all employees.

Key skills/competency

• Performance Engineering
• Python Optimization
• Postgres Performance
• GraphQL Performance
• System Scalability
• Observability
• Load Testing
• Distributed Systems
• SRE Practices
• Database Tuning