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Salary: USD 0 - 356,500 / annual
Wave is building financial services for Africa, with a mission to make it the first cashless continent. The company has grown to millions of users across 9 countries and operates a critical financial infrastructure serving tens of millions of people.
As CTO, you will own engineering end-to-end: systems, people, and standards. Key responsibilities include:
**Scaling with simplicity**: Protect Wave's culture of fewer processes, simple designs, and deeply understood tools as headcount grows. Ensure engineers maintain high ownership and visibility into complexity tradeoffs.
**Reliability and standards**: Set standards for uptime, incident response, and change management for a system that moves money for millions. You are accountable for meeting these standards.
**Engineering leadership**: Lead an engineering organization of ~132 people across 5 teams (Payment, User-facing products, Internal, Platform, and Security/Data/Infrastructure). You'll inherit 5 direct reports and be responsible for hiring, developing, and managing engineering managers and directors. You'll be personally involved in senior hiring.
**AI strategy**: Set Wave's vision on AI adoption. The company is already seeing AI accelerate product velocity and wants to become truly AI-forward across engineering and the broader organization.
**Growth and architecture**: Support expansion across new markets. Plan the right technical architecture and organizational structure to scale smoothly as Wave grows.
**Communication**: Represent engineering transparently to the company, leadership, and regulators. Wave values public conversations, frequent all-hands sessions, and clear documentation of major decisions.
**Technical context**: The stack includes Python 3 with mypy on the backend, GraphQL APIs, Postgres/Redis, Kotlin/Jetpack (Android), Swift/SwiftUI (iOS), TypeScript/React (web). Infrastructure runs on GCP with Kubernetes and Terraform. Current work includes agentic developer tooling, large-scale database migration, and monolith refactoring.
Reports directly to CEO Drew Durbin. This is a fully remote role with flexibility across talent hubs (Spain, UK, East Coast USA, Canada, Kenya, Ghana) and African operating markets. Expect minimum twice-yearly travel to markets to stay connected to local realities, teams, and users (Wave covers costs).
