Telephony Engineer

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’ll help us achieve it

At Wave, we manage a complex communications infrastructure to ensure our customers can reach us when in need, and similarly for Wave to convey important information to our customers. As a Telephony Engineer at Wave, you will be responsible for ensuring this infrastructure is highly reliable, scalable and cost-effective to support our rapid growth. You will design, implement, and maintain robust infrastructure and tools to handle millions of daily transactions in the form of voice calls, SMS and USSD sessions across multiple countries.

In this role, you'll;

• Design and implement physical networks that are secure, reliable and performant
• Owning the end-to-end integration and onboarding process for new telecommunication partners
• Optimizing performance and cost efficiency of backbone telephony services in a hybrid cloud/datacenter setup
• Automating telephony deployments and promoting infrastructure-as-code best practices
• Improving system observability through metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting
• Collaborating with product teams to proactively improve the reliability of our services
• Participating in and improving our on-call incident response processes
• Championing security and compliance in our infrastructure

Some challenges you’ll help us tackle

• Scaling our communications infrastructure to handle 10x users
• Keeping costs stable and predictable as we scale up
• Ensuring 99.99% uptime for call processing systems despite unreliable local infrastructure
• Enabling millions of financial transactions with dependable delivery of OTP notifications
• Improving end-to-end testing of voice call flows
• Leading or being involved in the resolution of complex incidents and problems

Key details

• You can work remotely from anywhere (between UTC -1 and +3) with reliable Internet access.
• Wave covers travel once per year to one of our operating countries in Africa, as well as a yearly stipend of $800 to meet with coworkers.
• 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.
• Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, we are offering a salary of up to $144,000 USD (paid in your local currency equivalent), plus a generous equity package.
• This role involves participating in an on-call rotation. When you’re on call you’ll carry a pager (just an app installed on your phone; we use PagerDuty for this), and in case an incident happens on your watch, you’ll be expected to be able to start troubleshooting within 15 minutes
• Major benefits: 
• Subsidized health insurance for you and your dependents and retirement contributions (both vary from country-to-country.
• 6 months fully paid parental leave and subsidized fertility assistance.
• Flexible vacation, with most folks taking between 30-40 days per year. 
• $10,000 annual charitable donation matching.

Requirements

• 4+ years of experience in an SRE, DevOps, Network or Telecommunications Engineering role
• Solid understanding of networking and distributed systems. Can be trusted to design scalable and secure networks
• Demonstrable experience dealing with on-premises infrastructure
• Strong experience with cloud platforms (GCP preferred) and Terraform
• Track record of successfully implementing observability, reliability metrics, auto-provisioning and other SRE best practices
• Methodical troubleshoot skills; ability to diagnose complex networking issues spanning multiple distributed systems and network layers
• Proficiency in at least one backend language, preferably Python
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills
• Passion for our mission of bringing financial services to underserved markets

Bonus points for

• Knowledge of telephony-specific technologies: SIP, RTP, SMPP and USSD protocols. 
• Familiarity with our tech stack (Kamailio, Asterisk, Docker, Ansible, Python, Homer/Hepic, Datadog, Sentry, Redis, GraphQL)
• Past experience working with Twilio APIs
• Understanding of VoIP setups and optimization
• Good grasp of security best practices and compliance standards for financial services
• Contributions to open-source projects or infrastructure community

You might be a good fit if you

• Care a lot about working on software whose mission you can believe in
• Have a bias for action. You see a problem, you fix a problem. You get buy-in for your solutions and keep tickets moving
• Have a growth mindset and a willingness to use your skills and experience to mentor less-experienced engineers
• Have the desire to learn from others and make yourself better every day
• Are excited to build world-class infrastructure that powers economic opportunity for an entire continent

About Engineering at Wave

We value:

• Boring technology
• Simple, predictable designs
• Deeply understanding our tools and systems
• Being tenacious in the face of tricky problems
• Constantly trying to improve, as engineers and colleagues

Our stack (note that we will train you on any of these—you don't need prior experience—and you probably won't work much/at all with the frontend parts):

• Backend: Python 3 (+ mypy) monolith
• Monitoring/observability: Honeycomb, Datadog, PGAnalyze
• Database: Postgres
• Orchestration: Kubernetes
• Infrastructure: GCP/DCs/Terraform
• Networking: Wireguard, Tailscale, Palo Alto, F5
• Telephony: Flex, Asterisk, Twilio
• Cache: Redis
• Data warehouse: Snowflake
• API layer: GraphQL
• Android frontend: Kotlin/Jetpack
• iOS frontend: Swift/SwiftUI
• Web frontend: TypeScript/React

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.