Senior Product Designer

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 9 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 and Côte d'Ivoire, with millions of users, growing rapidly year-on-year. And, we’re still in the early days of our product roadmap and potential impact on people’s everyday lives.

We are growing our product design team and looking for an experienced mobile designer to help make great iOS and Android apps. You will have the opportunity to make financial services more accessible and inclusive for millions of people through working with thoughtful product managers, researchers, and engineers!

In this Senior Product Designer role you’ll:

• Work closely with product managers, user researchers, engineers, and data analysts from the start to end of a feature.
• Create high quality designs, interactions, and prototypes to explore ideas in service of the best solution for the project (Wave uses Figma).
• Craft user research plans and work directly with our product operations analysts/user researchers to identify problems and validate solutions in user testing.
• Contribute to Wave’s design system and component library.
• Talk to customers and find solutions to their problems by thinking critically from their perspective.
• Communicate the reasoning behind your product decisions in review sessions.
• Prototype visual and UX concepts and iterate towards the right solution.

Key details

• This is a fully remote role. Candidates must be based in one of our hiring hubs (US, UK, Spain, Kenya, Ghana, Canada) or in one of our operating markets in Africa, including Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, and Burkina Faso.
• You'll travel to one of our key markets for a 1 week immersion trip with your immediate team (Wave covers all costs). Outside of this 1 week immersion, you’ll also travel to a market country with our product design lead and PMs, for a total of travel 2x a year. You’re highly encouraged to visit market counties more often! We also provide a yearly stipend of $1,200 USD to meet with coworkers every year.
• Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula, paid in your local currency equivalent plus a generous equity package. For this role, we are offering a salary of up to 216,900 USD based on your location (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 21-30 days exclusive of statutory holidays.
• $10,000 annual charitable donation matching.

Requirements

• Fluency in English.
• At least 8 years of end-to-end in-house experience, preferably with a consumer focus product design with mobile apps.
• Excellent visual and interaction design skills, with an eye at removing friction from flows.
• Attention to detail and high level of visual craft.
• Strong illustration and animation skills. We use After Effects at Wave but anything that can be converted to a Lottie file works.
• Ability to deliver high-quality designs with speed and polish.
• Bias towards action. Identify UX improvements without waiting for the perfect conditions.
• Experience with low and high-fidelity design & prototyping.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
• Ability to think through complex interaction design as well as thinking about tradeoffs of each solution.
• Curiosity for understanding and unpacking customer behaviors and needs.
• Experience balancing business goals, customer needs, and technical tradeoffs, while explaining your point of view to the team.

You might be a good fit if you

• Are detail-oriented and able to balance multiple projects.
• Can iterate separate concepts quickly to user test design bets. The ability to move fast and update designs based on customer feedback is an important quality we’re looking for.
• Think carefully about in-the-weeds details and their role within the design system.
• Feel comfortable anticipating and designing for edge cases.
• Enjoy pairing with designers, engineers, and product managers.
• Are excited to learn about how all our products work together.
• Can speak, read, and write in French. This is nice to have but not a strong requirement - we have large markets in West Africa where French will come in handy. There are plenty of folks at Wave who do not speak/read/write in French and still do well :)

Our team

• We have a rapidly growing in-country team in Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Uganda, Niger, Sierra Leone, and Cameroon 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.

Key skills/competency

• Mobile Product Design
• User Experience UX
• Interaction Design
• Prototyping Figma
• User Research
• Design Systems
• iOS/Android UI
• Problem Solving
• Visual Craft
• Stakeholder Collaboration