Senior Recruiter, Expansion

Our mission

We're making Africa the first cashless continent.

In 2017, over half the population in Sub-Saharan Africa had no bank account. That's for good reason-the fees are too high, the closest branch can be miles away, and nobody takes cards. Without access to financial institutions, people are forced to keep their savings under the mattress. Small business owners rely on lenders who charge extortionate rates. Parents spend hours waiting in line to pay school fees in cash.

We're solving this by building financial services that just work: no account fees, instantly available, and accepted everywhere. In places where electricity, water and roads don't always work, you can still send money with Wave. In 2017, we launched a mobile app in Senegal for cash deposit, withdrawal, and peer-to-peer and business payments. Now, we have millions of users across 9 countries and are growing fast.

Our goal is to make Africa the first cashless continent and that's where you come in...

How you'll help us achieve it

Wave is entering new markets every year and when we launch, the first hires have to be right, and they have to happen before there is an office, an HR team, a salary benchmark, or a single person on the ground who knows the local talent market.

This role exists to solve that. You'll be a deployable recruiter on our expansion recruiting team, sent into new markets ahead of launch to do the groundwork that can't be done remotely, and to stay long enough to hand a working hiring engine to the permanent team. We've proven this model works. What we need now is someone who can do it in francophone markets.

In this role, you’ll;

• Deploy into new markets from roughly a month before launch, and own hiring on the ground through the critical early months.
• Build the talent map from scratch: who exists in this market, where they work, what they earn, what will move them, and which profiles simply don't exist locally and will need to come from elsewhere.
• Establish realistic compensation benchmarks for a market with no reliable salary data, and feed those back so our offers land rather than get laughed at.
• Own full-cycle recruitment for the first cohort of hires, weighted heavily toward leadership and business-critical roles that shape everything after them.
• Cover the gap before People Ops arrives: onboarding the first hires, sorting practicalities alongside the launch team, and acting as the People function in-country until the permanent hire is in post.
• Hire and hand over to your own replacement, then set them up to succeed without you.
• Keep Greenhouse clean and current in conditions that make it tempting not to, so that pipeline health and funnel data stay usable from anywhere.
• Carry the Wave hiring bar into markets where nobody knows us yet, and be the first credible face of Wave to senior candidates in that country.
• Capture what you learn each launch: what worked, what the market did, what we'd do differently  so market three is faster than market one.

Key details

• You can be based in any of our operating countries. You'll be hired locally, on a local contract, and that country is your home base between assignments.
• This is a mobile role by design. You'll be deployed to our newest launch markets, typically arriving around a month before launch and staying one to four months, then moving on to the next. Expect to spend the majority of the year outside your home country. If that isn't something you actively want, this is the wrong role.
• Work authorization in one of our operating countries is required. We handle the visas and permits for your deployments.
• Deployments are supported: travel, accommodation, and an assignment allowance.
• Fluency in French and English is essential. Most of our upcoming launches are in francophone markets and you will be sourcing, interviewing, negotiating, and onboarding in French.
• Our salaries are competitive and calculated using a transparent formula.
• We support working parents with generous parental leave (26 weeks for mothers, 4 weeks for fathers) and subsidized child care when you return to work.
• We help you live your fullest life now and we subsidize gym memberships and fitness classes.
• Airtime reimbursement

Requirements

• 6+ years owning end-to-end recruitment.
• 3+ years of in-house recruiting in Africa, in high-growth or scaling environments.
• Full professional fluency in French and English, including negotiating comp and handling difficult conversations in both.
• Experience recruiting in a market you did not previously know, where you had to build the map yourself rather than work an existing network.
• Strong experience hiring for both field and office roles.
• Right to work in one of our operating countries, and a passport and personal circumstances that allow you to move across the continent on short notice.
• Genuine willingness and ability to live and work away from home for months at a time, repeatedly.
• Excellent stakeholder management, with the ability to earn credibility fast with country leadership you've just met.
• Strong analytical mindset and comfortable with metrics, KPIs, and spreadsheets.
• High autonomy in ambiguous conditions, often as the only recruiter in the country.

You might be a good fit if you

• Want a job that moves. You like arriving somewhere new, working out how it functions, and getting something running.
• Thrive in build-from-scratch environments with no playbook, no brand recognition, and no local team yet.
• Are comfortable being the only Talent person in a market and making decisions without a committee.
• Are passionate about financial inclusion in Africa.
• Take a data-driven approach even when the data doesn't exist yet, and build it.
• Love building networks quickly and from cold.
• Are a strong negotiator and closer.
• Can lead projects independently with minimal oversight.
• Are excited by launching new markets and scaling teams from the ground up.
• Handle the practical realities of frequent relocation well: visas, logistics, unfamiliar cities, working from somewhere that isn't an office yet.

Our team

• We have a rapidly growing in-country team in Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Uganda, Niger, Sierra Leone, and Cameroon plus remote team members spread across the world.
• We're deeply passionate about our mission of bringing radically affordable financial services to the people who need them most.
• We foster autonomy for our employees. You'll own your projects at every stage, from understanding the problem to monitoring your solution in production.
• We raised the largest Series A in Africa in 2021. Our world-class investors, include Founders Fund, Sequoia Heritage, Stripe, Ribbit Capital, Y Combinator, and Partech Africa.
• We are on  Y Combinator's top companies by revenue.

How to apply

Fill out the form below, and upload a resume in English and a cover letter describing your interest in Wave and the role.

We review applications frequently and recommend that you apply to the role that most closely aligns with your skills, experience and career goals.

Wave is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.