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 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…