Chief Technology Officer

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 We're looking for a CTO who wants to own engineering end to end: the systems, the people, and the standards for a company whose work changes lives. Keep us moving fast as we get bigger: We deliberately favour fewer processes, simple designs, and deeply understood tools, because that's what lets a small team operate a system this important. Your job is to protect that as the headcount grows and ensure more ownership per engineer, and a clear view of where complexity is worth the tradeoff. Own reliability: Wave is the financial system for tens of millions of people. You'll set the standards for uptime, incident response, and how carefully we change things that move money and you'll be accountable when we fall short. Build and lead the leadership layer: You'll inherit 5 direct reports and an engineering organization of ~100 people including security, data and infrastructure. You will be responsible for hiring, developing, and where necessary replacing engineering managers and directors. You'll be personally involved in senior hiring. Set our vision on AI: Set our vision on AI. We're already seeing AI accelerate product velocity, but we think we're in the early days of what we can do with AI in our apps and to move faster across the org. We want you to make Wave a truly AI forward organization. Support expansion. Wave already has over 25M users with accelerating growth. This scale and each new market brings new challenges and constraints. You'll help us plan the right architecture and organisational structure to help us grow smoothly and consistently. Represent engineering to the company. Wave is very transparent, whether that's defaulting to public conversations in slack, frequent Ask Wave Anything sessions, or defaulting to writing public docs to explain major decisions. You'll communicate openly and clearly about what engineering is doing and why, to an audience that includes engineers, non-engineers, our leadership team, and our when needed regulators. Key details Reports to: Drew Durbin, CEO. Team: Around ~100 engineers across 5 teams (Payment, User-facing products, Internal, non-product teams and platform) plus 5 leaders. Engineering teams are co-led by Product Managers and an engineering manager. Stack: Python 3 with mypy on the backend, GraphQL API layer, Postgres and Redis, Kotlin/Jetpack on Android (our main client), Swift/SwiftUI on iOS, TypeScript and React on the web. Infrastructure on GCP, managed with Kubernetes and Terraform. Most backend work happens in a large Python monolith, deployed across multi-country architecture. Current in-flight work includes agentic developer tooling, a large scale migration of our databases, and some refactoring of our monolith. Location: Location: This is a fully remote role. Candidates must be based in one of our talent hub countries (Spain, UK, East Coast of USA, Canada, Kenya, Ghana) or in one of our operating markets in Africa including Senegal,