Senior Backend Engineer
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Posted almost 3 years ago
Our Mission
In 2019, immigrants worldwide sent over $550 billion home to family and friends, dwarfing foreign governmental aid. In the age of cheap, quick transfers through services like Paypal and Venmo, these people are trekking to stores to pay fees averaging over 7% for transfers that typically take 24 hours or more.
Sendwave's mission is to change that by making sending money anywhere in the world easy and affordable. Since 2014, our app has allowed diaspora members from several African nations - and more recently Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, saving our users over 70% relative to Western Union and MoneyGram.
We are looking to rapidly expand around the world in the next year. That's where you come in...
How you'll help us achieve it
We’re looking for an experienced engineer with strong technical design skills and excitement about mentorship to help keep our team well rounded, and help keep our product quality high as we grow the team and the product.
Engineering at Sendwave has stayed small throughout the company’s growth and we’ve been able to sustainably work in a simple, monolithic backend. We’re getting ready to tackle more challenges more quickly— simultaneously launching multiple new markets and reinvesting in our user-facing product. To achieve this, we need our small product eng team to grow into a group of teams, and our monolithic backend to split into multiple focussed services.
We want to add another senior engineer to the team to help guide some of the architectural changes we’re making in the short term, and to mentor and grow our not-yet-senior team members to the point where they can take on those roles in the future.
About the team
- Engineering at Sendwave is split between 6 teams (Finance, Risk, Growth and Engagement, Delivery, Policy and Identity, and our Platform team). We’re about 30 engineers.
- Engineers at Sendwave work with Product to support all of our other teams including our Customer Service, Growth, Finance, and many more areas of the company.
- The engineering team is responsible for both our native iOS and Android clients and our python backend, including APIs, transaction delivery, performance, and support tools.
Day to day roles would include
- Participating in cross-team discussions about our system’s top-level architecture
- Mentoring and coaching other engineers to facilitate long term growth
- Reviewing code and design docs for other team members
- Identifying and helping to prioritize opportunities for our team to invest in the codebase(s) in order to move faster
- Help others on the team navigate and learn the most complex technical
- Building and deploying new features and improvements
Requirements
- 6+ years of professional software engineering experience or 4+ of professional software engineering experience in a high-growth, rapidly changing environment
- Solid understanding of server tools and concepts (python, databases, web performance) and familiarity with mobile (iOS & Android) platforms, and cloud infrastructure (e.g. AWS, GCP, Heroku).
- Demonstrated experience articulating a long term technical vision and making complex technical/architectural tradeoffs thoughtfully and collaboratively to get there
- Experience with and excitement about mentoring junior and mid-level engineers and shaping engineering culture across the company
- A willingness to travel 4 weeks/year
Bonus points if you:
- Have been part of a rapidly growing engineering organization and have experienced (and hopefully helped to solve!) the challenges that come with growth
- Have experience with DevOps and with the tools/technologies/processes for building easy developer workflows
Key details
- Our company is 100% remote. We are able to hire in North America (US & Canada), Africa (Senegal & Kenya), United Kingdom, and Europe (France, Germany, and Belgium). We will, however, consider full-time contractors in countries not listed.
- This is a permanent position
- Compensation: Worldwide: $117,000 - $138,000 | US: $147,000 - $173,000
- Major benefits:
- Subsidized health insurance and retirement contribution matching (both vary from country to country)
- 26 weeks fully paid parental leave and subsidized fertility assistance
- Unlimited vacation with a 20-day minimum requirement
- $10,000 annual charitable donation matching
You might be a good fit if you
- Are able to look at a technical system and envision how it could be more reliable and easier to make changes to
- Are excited about being a leader in an engineering org, but don’t necessarily want to be a manager
- Are passionate about achieving Sendwave's mission and are excited at the prospect of lowering remittance costs for diaspora communities.
Our team
- Our team of over 200 employees is fully distributed across the world— working from coffee shops, homes, and coworking spaces — making us one of the larger fully distributed growth-stage startups in the world.
- We are proud parents, community organizers, farmers, play in bands, teach yoga, moonlight as YouTube influencers, are former Olympians, and serial entrepreneurs.
- We collectively speak over twenty languages, including Akuapem, Amharic, Bengali, Ewe, Fante, Ga, Igbo, Kalenjin, Luganda, Oromo, Somali, Swahili, and Wolof.
- We recently joined forces with WorldRemit, another remittance company, and we’re excited about the ways we can continue to provide the best service to our users.
How to apply
Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. If interested, please submit your resume & cover letter describing your interest in Sendwave below. Please also indicate the countries in which you have work authorization.
Confidence can sometimes hold us back from applying for a job. But we'll let you in on a secret: there's no such thing as a 'perfect' candidate. Sendwave is a place where everyone can thrive. So however you identify and whatever background you bring with you, please apply if this is a role that would make you excited to wake up everyday.
Confidence can sometimes hold us back from applying for a job. But we'll let you in on a secret: there's no such thing as a 'perfect' candidate. Sendwave is a place where everyone can thrive. So however you identify and whatever background you bring with you, please apply if this is a role that would make you excited to wake up everyday.