Datacenter Engineer

Summary

Join Wave, a leading financial institution in Africa, as a Lead Datacenter Engineer and play a pivotal role in supporting our existing datacenter footprint and enabling future growth. You will be responsible for both the operational management and architectural design of our datacenter infrastructure across Sub-Saharan Africa. Key responsibilities include designing and deploying distributed micro-datacenter sites, managing on-premises infrastructure, owning vendor relationships, developing automation tooling, defining support processes, and integrating hybrid cloud models. This role offers the opportunity to tackle exciting challenges such as scaling a lightweight datacenter strategy, maintaining high availability, standardizing tooling, and establishing internal standards. You can work remotely from anywhere (between UTC -1 and +3) with reliable internet access and will travel up to 50% of the time during the first 12 months. Wave offers competitive salaries, generous equity packages, and major benefits including subsidized health insurance, parental leave, flexible vacation, and charitable donation matching.

Requirements

• Strong networking knowledge, particularly in Layer 2/3 protocols, routing, and switching
• Hands-on experience with datacenter hardware, including rack installations, power management, and environmental controls
• Proven track record in vendor engagement, hardware procurement, and site commissioning
• Demonstrated ability to define internal standards and propose platform/tooling stacks from scratch
• Experience in integrating hybrid cloud models into existing infrastructure
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to mentor junior engineers and collaborate across teams
• Knowledge of Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) tools for monitoring and managing datacenter resources

Responsibilities

• Designing and deploying distributed micro-datacenter sites, each comprising 1–2 racks, ensuring scalability and reliability
• Managing on-premises infrastructure, coordinating remote hands, and troubleshooting issues to maintain high uptime
• Owning vendor relationships, overseeing hardware procurement, and planning logistics to support expansion
• Developing automation tooling and monitoring systems for availability, capacity planning, and performance optimization
• Defining and implementing support processes, including incident response protocols and participation in on-call rotations
• Integrating hybrid cloud models into the physical infrastructure strategy, ensuring seamless operation across environments
• Collaborating cross-functionally with platform, and security teams to ensure a cohesive infrastructure development
• Scaling a lightweight, cost-effective datacenter strategy to support rapid growth across diverse geographies
• Maintaining high availability despite local infrastructure challenges, ensuring consistent service delivery
• Standardizing tooling and automation across physical and hybrid cloud environments to streamline operations
• Establishing internal standards and best practices for datacenter operations in a rapidly evolving infrastructure landscape

Preferred Qualifications

• Good grasp of security best practices and compliance standards for financial services
• Proficiency in Python scripting, particularly for automation, infrastructure orchestration, and tooling development
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Azure, especially in hybrid environments
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform or Ansible
• Exposure to containerization and orchestration technologies, including Docker and Kubernetes
• Understanding of security best practices and compliance standards relevant to datacenter operations
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, or Datadog

Benefits

• Subsidized health insurance for you and your dependents and retirement contributions (both vary from country-to-country
• 6 months fully paid parental leave and subsidized fertility assistance
• Flexible vacation, with most folks taking between 30-40 days per year
• $10,000 annual charitable donation matching