Chief Technology Officer

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 fast as we get bigger: We deliberately favor 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 genuinely worth it.
• Own reliability: Wave is the financial system for millions of people who have no alternative. 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 ~132 people including security, data and infrastructure. The CISO will also be reporting to you. 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. We're already shipping AI in production as autonomous voice and digital agents handle over 10 million customer interactions a month across West Africa and we're building tooling so engineers can use coding agents safely inside a large Python monolith. You’ll help us be truly AI forward, not just a pragmatic adopter.
• Support expansion. Wave is growing fast, 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 unusually transparent: everyone sees monthly update from our CEO. You'll write clearly about what engineering is doing and why, to an audience that includes engineers, non-engineers, our leadership team, and, when needed, our regulators.

Key details

Reports to: Drew Durbin, CEO.

Team: Around ~132 engineers across 5 teams (Payment, User-facing products, Internal, non-product teams and platform) plus 5 leaders. Engineering teams are co-led by a product manager and an engineering manager. Data science and analytics sits in the engineering organization; corporate IT does not for now.

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: 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, Côte d'Ivoire, or Burkina Faso. Expect to travel to our markets a minimum of twice per year to stay close to local realities, products, teams and of course our users. Wave covers all costs.

Compensation: 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 $356,500 USD, plus a generous equity package. 

• Wave provides a yearly $1,200 stipend to support coworking meetups with teammates.
• 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.

Process: The process runs up to 5 conversations, including 2 technical discussions. We want this to be a 2-way assessment: as much a chance for you to evaluate us as for us to get to know you. Along the way you'll meet our CEO, Head of People, Head of Product, both Engineering Directors, and a senior leader from one of our markets.

Requirements

• You've managed an engineering organization of at least~100 people, including managers who manage others. You can describe how your own job changed as the org grew.
• You have a software engineering background and are good at it. You can still read code and follow a technical argument to the end.
• You've been accountable for a system where failure was expensive: money, safety, or regulated data.
• You've hired senior engineering leaders, and you've moved someone out of a role that wasn't working. You can talk about both honestly.
• You write well. Clear, short, and persuasive, for readers who aren't engineers.
• You have an actual point of view on AI in engineering: something you've tried, changed, or abandoned, not a plan to look into it.
• You believe in what we're building and can say why without being prompted.

You might be a good fit if you

• Would rather run a great team than be the smartest engineer in the room, and don't feel a loss in that trade.
• Are comfortable being the person who says the unwelcome thing in a meeting, and can do it without making it personal.
• Change your mind in public when the evidence changes.
• Prefer the simplest system that works to the most interesting one.
• Care about what our users actually experience: how long a transfer takes on a bad network, what happens to a shop owner when a deposit fails and bring that up unprompted when discussing infrastructure.
• Take responsibility for outcomes rather than processes, including when the outcome is bad.
• Are drawn to a company that publishes its numbers internally every month, expects direct feedback in both directions, and would rather be embarrassingly honest than comfortable.