Performance Engineer

Wave Mobile Money is on a mission to make Africa the first cashless continent by providing accessible financial services. As the first Performance Engineer, you will establish performance engineering practices to optimize system performance and scalability for millions of users across multiple countries.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and operate Wave’s performance engineering function from the ground up, defining strategy, tooling, and processes for performance testing and optimisation
• Profile and analyse production performance, using observability and debugging tools to identify bottlenecks across application code, database queries, caching, networking, and infrastructure
• Partner with and mentor backend developers and database engineers to design and roll out performance improvements, including code optimisations, query tuning, caching strategies, and architecture changes
• Improve our observability stack for performance signals by creating metrics, traces, profiling, and alerting to help teams understand system behaviour under load
• Develop and maintain load, stress, and scalability testing frameworks to evaluate the performance of our backend monolith, GraphQL APIs, and Postgres/CockroachDB-backed workloads
• Ensuring our monolith and database can safely support the expected user growth (4x in the next 3 years)
• Building internal tooling for self-service and automated load testing of critical API and database code paths
• Using profiling and observability to reduce the latency of key GraphQL queries and make the tooling readily available to all engineers
• Identifying performance regressions early and making them visible across engineering
• Creating performance guidelines and training materials for backend engineers
• Create automated performance testing in CI/CD to ensure every significant change is evaluated for throughput, latency, and resource efficiency

Requirements:

• 7+ years of experience in performance engineering, SRE, or systems optimisation
• Deep proficiency in Python performance analysis and optimisation
• Deep understanding of Postgres performance, SQL optimisation, indexing, and query execution
• Experience with GraphQL performance
• Experience building internal performance tooling or platforms that other engineers use
• Track record of measurable performance improvements (reduced latency, lower costs, improved throughput)
• Demonstrated expertise in performance testing, load testing, profiling, and optimisation of backend services and databases
• Strong programming skills in more than one programming language (Python preferred as one of them)
• Solid understanding of networking, distributed systems, and caching strategies
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills. This role will succeed by enabling product engineers to create more performant code
• Always ask: 'Is this code the best way to delight users?'
• Love tackling hard problems and asking for help when needed
• Enjoy understanding complex systems
• Communicate clearly with people from different backgrounds
• Write clean, maintainable code with future engineers in mind
• Seek continuous growth as both engineer and collaborator
• Are curious about the tools you use and how they work