Product Manager - Risk

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 six countries and are growing fast.

Our goal is to make Africa the first cashless continent and that's where you come in...

How you will help us achieve it

The goal of the Risk product team is to reduce Wave’s Risk profile through our product, mainly focused on anti-fraud measures and our user identity verification strategy. While the team works on a variety of problems, some of our core focuses include:

• Preventing users from getting scammed through machine learning models and security interventions.
• Improving our user identification and login processes in general.
• Reducing abuse of promotions and products by users and agents to gain money. 

We’re looking for someone with both product manager experience and some exposure to anti-fraud/risk topics to lead this team.

In this role, you’ll; 

• Own our key user scam and product abuse (“gaming”) metrics.
• Own the product roadmap to improve user security, prevent scams, and make gaming more difficult.
• Lead a team of engineers, data analysts, and our Head of Risk Operations to execute on our risk strategy, which may include:
• Developing new user-facing security features like security interventions.
• Improving our core login and account recovery flows for users.
• Developing new machine learning models and heuristics to detect scams and gaming.
• Developing internal tools to improve Risk Ops efficiency and collaborate with our Head of Risk Ops to improve internal processes.
• Perform ad hoc analysis to catch new types of gaming and scam patterns.
• Perform user research and design new user-facing security features.
• Run A/B tests for new features, support processes, and new technologies such as biometric recognition.
• Be a company-wide expert on all things risk: Work with leads to perform risk assessments for new features and advise on best risk management practices.

You might be a good fit if you

• Have 4+ years product management experience with exposure to identity, fraud, or fraud adjacent products, ideally in payments or fintech.
• Are highly metrics and data driven in your decision making. 
• Have a good intuition for how bad actors operate and what kinds of mitigation strategies are effective at stopping them.
• Have a Sherlock-like investigative mindset: Can perform ad-hoc analyses with SQL, dig into individual scam reports, etc. to discover new scam and gaming methods. Can weigh this with quantitative data.
• Are scrappy, know how to run experiments, and like to build products iteratively.
• Know how to balance user security with user experience to avoid creating a negative user experience for too many users .
• Bonus:
• Have experience working in West African markets or other markets with low technology literacy.
• Have experience working with or leading Ops teams.
• Have experience working with cross-cultural workplaces.

Key Details

• You can work remotely from anywhere (between UTC -5 and +2) with reliable internet access.
• You’re willing to travel to one of our key markets a few times per year for ~6 days. We also provide a yearly stipend to meet with coworkers.
• Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, depending on your level, we offer a salary of up to $198,000 USD (paid in your local currency equivalent), plus a generous equity package.
• We run performance reviews twice a year and award bonuses or promotions to strong performers who have been with the company for more than six months.
• Major benefits:
• Subsidised health insurance for you and your dependents and retirement contributions (both vary from country to country).
• 6 months of fully paid parental leave and subsidised fertility assistance.
• Flexible vacation, with most folks taking between 30-40 days per year. 
• $10,000 annual charitable donation matching.

Our team

• We have a rapidly growing in-country team in Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, and Uganda, plus remote team members spread across the world.
• We're deeply passionate about our mission of bringing radically affordable financial services to the people who need them most.
• We foster autonomy for our employees. You'll own your projects at every stage, from understanding the problem to monitoring your solution in production.
• We raised the largest Series A in Africa in 2021. Our world-class investors, include Founders Fund, Sequoia Heritage, Stripe, Ribbit Capital, Y Combinator, and Partech Africa.
• In 2023, we were on Y Combinator's top 50 companies by revenue.

How to apply

Fill out the form below, and upload a resume in English and a cover letter describing your interest in Wave and the role.

We review applications frequently and recommend that you apply to the role that most closely aligns with your skills, experience and career goals.

Wave is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.