Staff Engineer (Remote International Jobs)

Who we are

Sendwave is on a mission to make sending funds to loved ones as easy and affordable as sending a text. What makes us stand out in a sea of similar apps? We deeply care about the diasporas and communities we serve — and that comes with a sense of connection to the markets we operate in. We strive to make life better for everyone who touches our product. That means recognizing and honoring the human experience behind sending money. We do that by remaining fee-free in most of our markets and offering round-the-clock customer care.

Our app is currently available in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and parts of Europe, and sends funds to 19 receiving countries for over 500,000 users. We currently have a 4.6-star rating on Trustpilot — people put their faith in us to deliver their money quickly, securely, and affordably. And we’re pretty darn proud of that.

How we work
What we’re most proud of though is our brilliant, creative, and tenacious team. Our remote-first workplace means you’ll be working with Sendwavers in Europe, Africa, South America, and the U.S. that all share a core set of Sendwave values. What exactly are those values? Glad you asked.

Prioritize fearlessly.
There will always be more problems to solve and opportunities to pursue than we have the capacity for. We’re not afraid to say no and are willing to let fires burn, knowing that to win we must discern and execute decisively on the vital few rather than the important many.
Take full ownership of the outcomes we’re responsible for.
Our job is not to do what we can to solve a problem. It’s to ensure that problem is solved. If an attempt to solve a problem doesn’t work, we seek an alternative. If we need help, we request it, and, if necessary, demand it.

Forge a diverse team and inclusive culture.
We believe the challenges we’re addressing will be best met by a truly global, diverse team, working together. We’re not naive to the systemic bias and discrimination that make this easier said than done, so we check our egos, listen deeply, and measure progress towards making this a fundamental part of our success.
Maximize our rate of learning.

We view projects as ever-evolving drafts and welcome opportunities to discover that what we had in mind won’t work so we can move to an even better end state. Most importantly, we do this fast. The faster we run these loops — as a company and individuals — the faster we’ll achieve our mission.
Embrace embarrassing honesty from ourselves and others.
We function best when we’re open and honest with one another — especially about our challenges and doubts. We lean into uncomfortable conversations and support our colleagues when they do the same.
Maximize energy, not time spent.
We measure our own and others’ contributions by objectives reached, not time spent. Living a full life outside of work is necessary for high achievement over the long term.

Your key areas of focus :
You’ll solve problems that either lack explicit ownership or will provide dramatic leverage to the team by writing code yourself or leading small temporary tiger teams to spin out solutions quickly. You’ll mostly be focused on the backend but can operate across the stack.
Work with engineering leadership to help define processes, architecture, and practices that improve development velocity and software quality at Sendwave.

You’ll mentor and support engineers across the organization to develop technical solutions that align with longer-term goals. We’re still an org that values quick delivery so you’ll help scope projects that work incrementally toward those longer-term goals.
Reinforcing our engineering culture which values inclusivity, low ego, and open paths of communication across teams. We have a couple of platform-specific Repos; success is only possible if the barriers between teams are kept low.
When teams are slow to deliver on a capability, you’ll help unblock them by rolling up your sleeves and writing code.

In your first few months you’ll:
Solve some long-standing problems at Sendwave. These will mostly be smaller fires that we’ve let burn because they’re not ideal but also not our biggest problems. You’ll work on projects of increasing scope, leverage and visibility.
You’ll review design documents and decisions across the company reinforcing our existing norms around those practices.
Work with engineering leadership to both define the longer-term technical goals as well defining the incremental steps to get there.

What you bring to the table:
8+ Years of software development experience.
A strong desire and aptitude to lead through technical expertise and the ability to motivate engineers across team boundaries.
You over-communicate — we have always been a fully remote company and, as we scale, we’ve leaned further into async communication. You’ll never leave the status of a project in doubt.
A necessary part of building things that other developers use will be writing good documentation. You should be excited by that since your users will be Sendwave’s other engineers.

Bonus points if you:
You’ve led people before but want to focus on development for a while.
You’re comfortable with a few elements of our stack (or are just excited to learn):
Terraform on GCP + Kubernetes with Helm
Postgres SQL, Bigquery, Hevo
Python backend
Kotlin on Android, Swift on iOS

Are a self-starter, take initiative, and require little day-to-day direction to be successful
Are familiar with any of the communities we serve Are passionate about achieving Sendwave’s mission and are excited at the prospect of lowering remittance costs for the communities we serve.

Keys details:

Competitive Compensation
Location:
Our company is 100% remote and has been since we were founded. Sendwave hires new team members in countries around the world. All of our roles are remote, however, some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Recruiting team can help answer any questions about location as we move further into recruiting process. For this role we are targeting candidates in  US, Canada, Costa Rica, UK, Germany, France, Kenya, Senegal (#LI-Remote)
For this role we are anticipating travel for about four weeks out of the year, for companywide and team-level meetings.

Major benefits:
Subsidized health insurance and retirement contribution matching (both vary from country to country)
26 weeks of fully paid parental leave and subsidized fertility assistance
Unlimited vacation with a 20-day minimum requirement
$10,000 annual charitable donation matching

And best of all:
Our team of over 400 employees is fully distributed across the world. We are working from coffee shops, homes, and co-working spaces — making us one of the larger fully distributed growth-stage startups in the world.

We are proud parents, community organizers, farmers, band members, yoga teachers, YouTube influencers, former Olympians, and serial entrepreneurs.
We collectively speak over twenty languages, including Akuapem, Amharic, Bengali, Ewe, Fante, Ga, Igbo, Kalenjin, Luganda, Oromo, Somali, Swahili, Wolof, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish.
We recently joined forces with WorldRemit, another remittance company. We’re excited about the ways we can collaborate and continue to provide the best service to our users.

Ready to apply?
Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. If interested, please submit your resume along with a cover letter highlighting why your experience demonstrates you meet the requirements of the role. 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 every day.