Observability Specialist at Wave

Job description

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 Wave is now the largest financial institution in Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire, with millions of users, growing rapidly year-on-year. And, we’re still in the early days of our product roadmap and potential impact on people’s everyday lives. As an Observability Engineer at Wave, you will help engineers understand, operate, debug, and improve the systems that power payments for millions of users across Africa. You will own and evolve Wave’s observability platform across our Python backend, GraphQL API, Postgres and CockroachDB databases, Kubernetes workloads, cloud infrastructure, and on-premises environments. Your work will make it easier for product, database, infrastructure, and security teams to detect problems and regressions early, understand system behaviour, resolve incidents quickly, and make well-informed reliability and performance decisions. You'll work in the newly formed Performance & Observability team and report to the Director of Platform. You'll partner closely with infrastructure, database, and product engineering teams to improve how we instrument our services. In this role you'll: Improve our understanding of production behaviour across application code, GraphQL APIs, databases, caches, Kubernetes workloads, cloud infrastructure, async jobs, and on-premises environments. Partner with product and platform teams to define meaningful service-level indicators, reduce alert fatigue, and ensure alerts are actionable, reliable, and tied to user impact. Build internal tooling and self-service workflows that help engineers instrument services, investigate incidents, analyse performance, and understand dependencies. Help teams identify reliability, latency, capacity, and cost issues before they become user-facing incidents. Establish and implement observability standards, documentation, and training materials that scale across Wave’s engineering organisation. Operate and improve our observability platform (e.g., Datadog, Honeycomb, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) while controlling costs as data volume grows. 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 work moving. Approach your work with a growth mindset and use your skills and experience to mentor less-experienced engineers. Are excited to build world-class infrastructure that powers economic opportunity for an entire continent. Requirements 5+ years of experience in observability, SRE, platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, backend engineering, or production systems engineering. Deep understanding of metrics, logging, tracing, profiling, alerting, dashboards, service-level indicators, and incident response workflows at scale. Experience building internal tools, libraries, automation, or platforms used by other engineers. Excellent communication and collaboration skills. This role succeeds by help