Senior Software Engineer

Writing clear, concise, elegant, and well-tested code.

Working as part of a small, agile, integrated product team that’s focused on continual improvement of their skills and helping each other learn new things.

Translating complex, cross-system challenges into well-defined execution plans.

Delivering code that goes beyond what is strictly assigned.

By taking responsibility for monitoring or alerts needed to support and maintain new initiatives post-launch

Having a substantial impact on the entire team’s pace and quality of deliverables;

By assisting other team members to solve problems and develop their own skills.

Through valuable technical insights into the work, e.g. creating a useful abstraction layer around multiple specific implementations or by applying advanced software design principles to a novel task.

Through their contributions, substantially reducing friction for the rest of the team, e.g. by delivering a particularly difficult and useful refactor.

Taking complete ownership of major initiatives or complex tasks from definition to delivery;

By working with external stakeholders to understand the end goals when required.

By creating delivery plans for entire initiatives.

Providing a level of expertise and skill that has an impact on the quality of software delivery outside their immediate team, while still being primarily focused on the delivery of their team, e.g.:

By delivering solutions within their team that provide substantial value to other parts of Engineering, and taking the initiative to make them widely available.

By facilitating technical planning discussions between their team and other teams or departments.

By providing technical expertise of such depth and/or breadth, they are solving some of Wave’s hardest challenges.

By finding opportunities to raise the skill level of Engineers outside their team.

5+ years building production web applications, including backend services in Python/Django (Ruby/Rails a strong plus).

Frontend experience with React and TypeScript. GraphQL/Apollo a plus.

Experience integrating with third-party financial or payroll APIs: webhooks, pagination, idempotency, retries and keeping data in sync.

Strong grasp of data modelling and source-of-truth design across multiple services.

Experience finding and fixing performance bottlenecks.

Hands-on with observability: Datadog metrics, traces and monitors, monitors-as-code (Terraform) and reducing alert noise.

Has shipped changes with feature flags and staged rollouts, and used analytics (e.g. Amplitude) to judge whether a release succeeded.

Writes clear technical docs, such as design docs, runbooks and investigation write-ups.

Nice to have: payroll, tax or fintech domain knowledge; event-driven systems (Kafka); careful handling of PII.

Occasional requirement to be on-call outside of standard hours.