Backend Engineer
Sendwave
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 area of focus:
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 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.
In the first few months, you'll be:
- Building and deploying new features and improvements
- 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
- Helping others on the team navigate and learn the most complex technical concepts
What you bring to the table:
- 4+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Solid understanding of server tools and concepts (python, databases, web performance), familiarity with developing APIs for third parties, and comfortable deploying to a cloud-based infrastructure (e.g. AWS, GCP, Heroku).
- Experience with and excitement about mentoring junior and mid-level engineers and shaping engineering culture across the company
- Experience articulating a technical solution, and working collaboratively with other engineers to see it through
- 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
Let's talk about benefits. Here are a few perks you can look forward to:
- Our company is 100% remote. We are able to employ people based in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Netherland, Poland, Germany, Belgium, Kenya and Senegal. We will, however, consider full-time contractors in countries not listed.
- This is a permanent position
- 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
And best of all:
- Our team of over 400 employees, fully distributed across the world. We are working from coffee shops, homes, and coworking spaces — making us one of the larger fully distributed growth-stage startups in the world.
- Proud parents, community organizers, farmers, play in bands, teach yoga, 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.
- Our new collaborators at WorldRemit, another remittance company. We recently joined forces, and we’re excited about the ways we can 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.
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