Job Specifications
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’re looking for a keen junior security engineer who’s independent, excited about getting things done, and ready to hit the ground running. You'll primarily be responsible for helping us monitor, tweak, and write new alerts. Secondary responsibilities will include helping product teams patch security holes, or working on smaller projects with the senior Engineers. Our customers trust us with their money, and you’ll be at the forefront of making sure we retain that trust!
The role is ideal for a security professional who enjoys writing code and is interested in hands-on programming as part of their day-to-day work, or for a junior SWE who recently transitioned into security engineering.
Our to-do list changes constantly, but here are some recent projects and activities:
Centralise application-level login and permissions enforcement
Configure and utilise external SIEM solutions to monitor our infrastructure
Help us increase our posture around secret management
Security review of our public-facing APIs
Partner with teams across Wave to define secure guardrails, supporting investigations and incident response
Work with our IT Team to fix any non-conformities found during audits by central banks and ISO certification
Our stack (prior experience is a strong plus, but not required):
backend: Python 3 (+ mypy)
API layer: GraphQL
android frontend: Kotlin/Jetpack
iOS frontend: Swift/SwiftUI
web frontend: TypeScript/React
database: Postgres/CockroachDB
infrastructure: GCP/Terraform
orchestration: Kubernetes
Key Details
This is a fully remote role. Candidates must be based in one of our talent hub countries (UK, Spain, Kenya and Ghana) or in one of our operating markets in Africa including Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, or Burkina Faso.
Wave provides a yearly $1,200 stipend to support coworking meetups with teammates.
Remote team members are expected to travel to our operational markets (e.g. Senegal or Côte d'Ivoire) at least once a year. Exceptions apply, but we’ve found this key to understanding our users and product.
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 $95,100 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 3 years of professional experience with a minimum of 2 years of it spent in a security-related role.
Strong Experience with Python.
Fluent English.
You might be a good fit if you
Are excited about finding the right balance between security and velocity.
Push through hard problems without giving up.
Have experience remediating non-conformities.
Are excited to work on lots of different security-related work, from audits to code refactors.
Work to make things easier for the next engineer who will touch your code.
Always try to improve as a programmer and colleague.
Are interested in penetration testing or have experience in the field already.
About engineering at Wave
We care about the big picture. We don’t hire engineers to just ship tickets. We hire them to solve problems. That means caring deeply about outcomes, understanding context, and jumping in wherever something’s broken, even if it’s technically “not your area.” When we see problems, inefficiencies, or opportunities to make something better, we act. We dig into operational issues, clarify fuzzy product specs, or step into unfamiliar code to
About the Company
We're making Africa the first cashless continent.
In 2017, nearly 60% of adults 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 w...
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