Chief Technology Officer

Job Description

Salary: up to $356,500 USD

Key Responsibilities

• Keep us moving fast as we get bigger: We deliberately favour fewer processes, simple designs, and deeply understood tools, because that’s what lets a small team operate a system this important. Your job is to protect that as the headcount grows and ensure more ownership per engineer, and a clear view of where complexity is worth the tradeoff.
• Own reliability: Wave is the financial system for tens of millions of people. You’ll set the standards for uptime, incident response, and how carefully we change things that move money and you’ll be accountable when we fall short.
• Build and lead the leadership layer: You’ll inherit 5 direct reports and an engineering organization of ~100 people including security, data and infrastructure. You will be responsible for hiring, developing, and where necessary replacing engineering managers and directors. You’ll be personally involved in senior hiring.
• Set our vision on AI: Set our vision on AI. We’re already seeing AI accelerate product velocity, but we think we’re in the early days of what we can do with AI in our apps and to move faster across the org. We want you to make Wave a truly AI forward organization.
• Support expansion. Wave already has over 25M users with accelerating growth. This scale and each new market brings new challenges and constraints. You’ll help us plan the right architecture and organisational structure to help us grow smoothly and consistently.
• Represent engineering to the company. Wave is very transparent, whether that’s defaulting to public conversations in slack, frequent Ask Wave Anything sessions, or defaulting to writing public docs to explain major decisions. You’ll communicate openly and clearly about what engineering is doing and why, to an audience that includes engineers, non-engineers, our leadership team, and our when needed regulators.

Key Requirements

• You’ve managed an engineering organisation of at ~100 people, including managers who manage others. You can describe how your own job changed as the org grew.
• You have a software engineering background and are good at it. You can still read code and follow a technical argument to the end.
• You’ve been accountable for a system where failure was expensive: money, safety, or regulated data.
• You’ve hired senior engineering leaders, and you’ve moved someone out of a role that wasn’t working. You can talk about both honestly.
• You write well. Clear, short, and persuasive, for readers who aren’t engineers.
• You have a clear and positive point of view on AI in engineering: something you’ve tried, changed, or abandoned, not a plan to look into it.
• You believe in what we’re building and can say why without being prompted.