Engineering Manager Database Reliability
Wave Mobile Money is a financial technology company providing affordable mobile money services across Africa. Its offerings include money transfers, deposits and withdrawals, bill payments, airtime purchases, merchant payments, collections, bulk payments, and checkout APIs.
Funding
Projects
About Wave Mobile Money Inc.
Wave Mobile Money builds and operates a mobile financial network intended to help make Africa the first cashless continent. Its consumer services enable users to deposit and withdraw money, send funds, pay bills, buy airtime, and access customer support through mobile applications and agents. Wave Business provides bulk payments, in-person merchant payments, cash collection tools, a business portal, and checkout APIs. The company serves consumers, agents, merchants, businesses, and other clients across multiple African countries.
Skills
About the Role
You will lead database reliability work across multiple environments, helping engineers design, maintain, and evolve high-performance database technologies. You will coach database engineers, improve incident response and capacity planning, and collaborate on platform database initiatives. You will drive monitoring, cost optimization, and performance tuning for Postgres, CockroachDB, and future databases. You will also hire and grow the function, ensure resilient production operations, and help prioritize reliability improvements.
Requirements
- At least five years of experience managing database or storage teams.
- Availability in a timezone between GMT-1 and GMT+3.
- Willingness to travel to Africa once per year for approximately six days.
- People management experience including coaching, performance evaluation, mentorship, and career development.
- Project management experience including prioritization, schedule tracking, deadline management, and cross-functional communication.
- Experience designing operational processes, including on-call rotations, incident response, postmortems, load testing, and capacity planning.
- Hiring experience, including staffing planning, interview design, candidate evaluation, and offer-stage support.
- Experience running mission-critical production databases, including replication, backups, migrations, and high availability or disaster recovery.
- Kubernetes and container orchestration skills.
- Cloud or data center infrastructure experience, preferably GCP.
Responsibilities
- Support engineers in architecting, maintaining, and evolving reliable, high-performance database technologies.
- Mentor and coach a globally distributed database engineering team.
- Shape incident response, postmortems, and capacity-planning processes.
- Collaborate with infrastructure, product, and security teams on database initiatives.
- Drive monitoring, cost optimization, and performance tuning for Postgres and CockroachDB.
- Hire and grow the database reliability team.
- Build tooling to observe and debug outages and performance problems.
- Harden backend systems against incidents.
- Enable product teams to identify and resolve reliability and performance issues.
- Respond to incidents, analyze postmortems, and prioritize follow-up actions.
Benefits
- Yearly $1,200 stipend for coworking meetups with teammates.
- Travel costs covered for annual travel to operational markets.
- Subsidized health insurance for employees and dependents.
- Retirement contributions.
- Six months of fully paid parental leave.
- Subsidized fertility assistance.
- Flexible vacation.
- $10,000 annual charitable donation matching.
- Equity package.
