Engineering Manager-Database Reliability

About the role

Wave is a rapidly growing financial services company aiming to make Africa the first cashless continent. We are seeking an experienced Engineering Manager to lead the Database Reliability Team, ensuring Wave’s databases remain highly available and scalable as our user base expands.

Responsibilities

• Support engineers in architecting, maintaining, and evolving reliable, high-performance database technologies across multiple environments.
• Mentor and coach a diverse, globally distributed team of database engineers.
• Shape and refine processes such as incident response, postmortems, and capacity planning to ensure smooth operations.
• Collaborate with infrastructure, product, and security teams on platform database initiatives.
• Drive best practices for monitoring, cost optimization, and performance tuning in Postgres, CockroachDB, and any future databases we adopt.
• Hire and grow the team as needed, shaping Wave’s DB reliability culture and standards.

Requirements

• At least five years of experience as a manager supporting database or storage teams.
• Willingness to travel to Africa once per year for approximately 6 days (Wave covers all costs).
• Demonstrable people management experience: coaching, performance evaluation, mentorship, and career development.
• Relevant project management experience: prioritization, tracking schedules and deadlines, and communication across team/org boundaries.
• Experience managing process design: running a smooth on-call rotation, incident response, postmortems, load testing, capacity planning, etc.
• Experience managing hiring: predicting staffing needs, designing interview loops, evaluating candidates, assisting with closing candidates at offer stage.

Technical Skills

• Proven track record of running mission-critical databases in production (replication, backups, migrations, HA/DR).
• Skilled with Kubernetes and container orchestration (experience running DB workloads in K8s is a bonus).
• Experience working in Cloud (preferably GCP) or Data Center infrastructure.

Key Details

• This is a fully remote role.
• Candidates must be based in one of our talent hub countries or in one of our operating markets in Africa including Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, or Burkina Faso.
• We provide 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.
• Wave offers a salary of up to $227,900 USD, plus a generous equity package.
• We provide major benefits including subsidized health insurance, retirement contributions, fully paid parental leave, flexible vacation, and annual charitable donation matching.