Engineering Manager-Database Reliability

1. About Our Client:

This organization operates in the financial services sector, addressing the challenge of limited access to banking and financial infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa. High fees, distant branches, and lack of card acceptance have historically excluded many from formal banking, forcing reliance on cash and costly lenders. The company tackles these issues by providing accessible, fee-free, and instant mobile financial services that function even where basic infrastructure is unreliable. Since launching in 2017, it has expanded rapidly to millions of users across nine countries, aiming to make Africa the first cashless continent.

2. About the Opportunity:

The Engineering Manager-Database Reliability leads the team responsible for ensuring the reliability, scalability, and security of the company’s database infrastructure. This role is critical to maintaining uninterrupted access to financial services for millions of users and supports the rapid growth of the platform. The position involves guiding technical architecture, improving operational processes, mentoring engineers, and collaborating across teams to uphold and enhance database performance and availability.

3. Responsibilities:

• Lead the database reliability team to maintain high availability and scalability of databases.
• Architect, maintain, and evolve database technologies across multiple environments.
• Mentor and coach a globally distributed team of database engineers.
• Develop and refine processes such as incident response, postmortems, and capacity planning.
• Collaborate with infrastructure, product, and security teams on database initiatives.
• Implement best practices for monitoring, cost optimization, and performance tuning for Postgres, CockroachDB, and other databases.
• Manage hiring and growth of the database reliability team, shaping culture and standards.

4. Requirements:

• Minimum five years of management experience supporting database or storage teams.
• Located in a timezone between GMT-1 and GMT+3.
• Willingness to travel to Africa annually for approximately six days.
• Demonstrated people management skills including coaching, performance evaluation, mentorship, and career development.
• Experience in project management, including prioritization, schedule tracking, and cross-team communication.
• Experience managing operational processes such as on-call rotations, incident response, postmortems, load testing, and capacity planning.
• Hiring experience with candidate evaluation and closing.
• Proven track record managing mission-critical databases in production, including replication, backups, migrations, and high availability/disaster recovery.
• Skilled with Kubernetes and container orchestration; experience running database workloads in Kubernetes is a plus.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, preferably Google Cloud Platform, or data center environments.

5. Pay Range and Compensation Package:

• Salary up to $227,900 USD depending on level and location.
• Equity package included.

6. Benefits & Perks:

• Subsidized health insurance for employees and dependents, varying by country.
• Retirement contributions.
• Six months of fully paid parental leave and subsidized fertility assistance.
• Flexible vacation ranging from 21 to 30 days, excluding statutory holidays.
• Annual charitable donation matching up to $10,000.
• Yearly $1,200 stipend to support coworking meetups.

Equal Opportunity Statement: Our client is an equal opportunity employer. They celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or national origin.

Note:

RemoteHunter is a recruitment partner of this role. Please note that all employment decisions, including candidate assessment, interviews, hiring, compensation, and employment terms, are made exclusively by the hiring employer.