About this Technical Product Manager - DevEx role at Wave
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
Your mission is to make it dramatically easier for our engineers to ship features and learn from them quickly, securely, and reliably. You'll aim for small-startup speed while meeting the quality bar of a large financial institution. Velocity here means removing friction and toil from the path between idea and learning, not asking people to work harder.
AI is a big part of the opportunity, and we're looking for a PM who is optimistic about its possibilities but pragmatic about what actually works. The goal is not to adopt the latest shiny AI tool; it's to deeply understand your internal users, experiment, and honestly evaluate what solves their problems, whether that's AI, process changes, or boring tooling that just works.
The Technical Product Manager - DevEx will:
- Lead a team of engineers with full ownership of how we deliver new features for our users and use AI solutions to remove impactful friction for our engineers and product managers.
- Define product goals, metrics, and roadmaps based on user needs and mission impact.
- Drive user research within our engineering and product teams.
- Write clear, compelling design docs and facilitate async, fast-moving decision-making.
- Over-communicate context, priorities, and decisions to ensure team alignment.
- Adjust priorities quickly based on feedback, experiments, or new learnings.
- Solve problems holistically, whether through product features, ops tooling or process changes.
In this role, you'll...
- Own the developer experience holistically, including any internal or external tooling needed to support it.
- Research and implement solutions for how we can use AI to remove engineering and development friction.
- Build your own prototypes to test ideas where possible.
- Relentlessly gather feedback (by talking to users and looking at data) to deeply understand the problem space and our engineers' and product managers' needs.
- Work from first principles to understand the engineers' and product managers' biggest problems and then figure out how our tooling should work to solve those problems.
- Prioritize the biggest problems blocking the engineers' and product managers' productivity and the impact on delivering value to our users fast and securely.
- Directly manage the DevEx team to help them grow in their careers, partnering with the Tech Lead, who will own the technical bar.
Key Details
- This is a fully remote role. Candidates must be based in one of our talent hub countries (UK, Spain, USA (East Coast), Canada, Kenya and Ghana) or in one of our operating markets in Africa including Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, or Burkina Faso
- Wave provides a yearly $1,200 stipend to support co-working meetups with teammates.
- Remote team members are expected to travel to our operational markets (e.g. Senegal or Côte d'Ivoire) at least once per year. Exceptions apply, but we’ve found this key to understanding our users and product.
- Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, depending on your level and location, we offer a salary up to $237,500 USD, plus a generous equity package.
- Major benefits:
- Subsidized health insurance for you and your dependents, and retirement contributions (both vary from country to country).
- 6 months of fully paid parental leave and subsidized fertility assistance.
- Flexible vacation, with most folks taking between 21-30 days per year.
- $10,000 annual charitable donation matching.
Requirements
- Have 3+ years of product management experience and hands-on engineering background (you’ve shipped production code) or direct PM ownership of a developer experience, or developer productivity function.
- Proven success in overseeing all elements of the product development lifecycle, such as user research, design, implementation and evaluation.
- Speak fluent English
- Bonus if you:
- Have proven experience with successfully rolling out AI-based solutions in a larger org
- Have professional experience in a consumer fintech company
You might be a good fit if you
- Resonate deeply with how we do product and have experience working that way.
- Are continuously iterating on using AI in real workflows with honest evaluation.
- Are a strong communicator who can inspire and lead by influence.
- Are great at coordinating across teams and excel at communicating across multiple cultures.
- Take ownership for outcomes and do whatever you can to make them close to inevitable.
- Have strong instincts for asking questions that could move the needle.
- Have the courage and persistence to replan when feedback or new information arrives.
- Always listen with empathy but ruthlessly prioritize based on impact.
About Product at Wave
Product has always been very important to us at Wave, starting from day one with two very strong product-minded founders. Product Managers play a central role in our organization, impacting large chunks of the company around them, similar to the founders they were shaped after years ago.
Our approach to building products may not be what you’ve seen in other places. Our processes are lightweight, informed by principles instead of methodologies and our PMs don’t just manage backlogs full of polished tickets. Read our write-up on product at Wave!
If you’re excited to own a real problem end-to-end, set your own goals, and guide a team toward outcomes that matter for real people, you’ll feel right at home here.
If that’s you, we’d love to meet you.
Our team
- We have a rapidly growing in-country team in Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Uganda, Niger, Sierra Leone, and Cameroon 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.
- We are on Y Combinator's top 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.
