Senior Machine Learning Engineer - LLM & Voice

Our Mission

We're making Africa the first cashless continent. In 2017, over half the population in Sub-Saharan Africa had no bank account. This was due to high fees, distant branches, and a lack of card acceptance. Without financial access, people are forced to keep savings insecurely, small business owners rely on extortionate lenders, and parents spend hours in line for cash payments.

Wave is solving this by building financial services that are effective: no account fees, instant availability, and universal acceptance. Even where basic infrastructure like electricity, water, and roads are unreliable, you can still send money with Wave. Since launching a mobile app in Senegal in 2017 for cash deposit, withdrawal, and peer-to-peer/business payments, we now serve millions of users across 9 countries and are rapidly expanding. Our ultimate 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 now the largest financial institution in Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, with millions of rapidly growing users. We are still in the early stages of our product roadmap and have immense potential to impact people’s daily lives. We empower millions of customers across West Africa with financial services through mobile money, and exceptional support is crucial to this mission. We believe the future of customer support involves machines handling routine, repetitive tasks, freeing humans to focus on high-value interactions that require empathy and creativity.

As an Applied AI Engineer on our Support Automation product team, you will:

• Bridge research and production, building AI models and agent systems that are integrated into real products.
• Architect, evaluate, and optimize autonomous voice and digital agents managing over 10 million customer interactions monthly across West Africa.
• Build solutions for the most challenging edge cases, including poor connectivity, low literacy, and languages with limited training data.
• Experiment with, evaluate, and integrate the latest voice and text models.
• Own problems end-to-end, from initial discovery to running solutions in production, collaborating with product and engineering leaders who prioritize tangible customer impact.

If you are motivated by ownership, excel at deep technical challenges, and aspire to build infrastructure serving millions in emerging markets, we encourage you to connect with us.

Our Stack

Prior experience with our stack is a strong plus, but not required:

• Backend: Python 3 (+ mypy)
• API Layer: GraphQL
• Android Frontend: Kotlin/Jetpack
• iOS Frontend: Swift/SwiftUI
• Web Frontend: TypeScript/React
• Database: Postgres/CockroachDB
• Infrastructure: GCP/Terraform
• Orchestration: Kubernetes

Key Details

This is a fully remote role. Candidates must be based in one of our talent hub countries (US, Canada, UK, Spain, Kenya, and Ghana) or in one of our operating markets in Africa (Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, or Burkina Faso). Wave provides a yearly $1,200 stipend to support coworking meetups with teammates. Remote team members are expected to travel to our operational markets (e.g., Senegal or Côte d'Ivoire) at least once a year. Exceptions apply, but we’ve found this vital for understanding our users and product. Our salaries are competitive and calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, depending on your level and location, we offer a salary up to $222,700, plus a generous equity package.

Major benefits include:

• Subsidized health insurance for you and your dependents and retirement contributions (country-specific).
• 6 months of fully paid parental leave and subsidized fertility assistance.
• Flexible vacation, with most individuals taking 21-30 days, exclusive of statutory holidays.
• $10,000 annual charitable donation matching.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in AI/ML engineering.
• Strong Python and backend engineering skills.
• Solid foundation in statistics and ML theory.
• Proven hands-on experience building with LLMs (prompt engineering, RAG, embeddings, fine-tuning, agent orchestration, etc.).
• Track record of taking ML models from prototype to production, with a deep focus on reliability, performance, and scalability.
• Fluency with AI coding agents, with bonus points for deploying them as part of production systems.

Bonus points for:

• Research background in speech or LLMs.
• Proven Voice AI experience (ASR, TTS, latency optimization, real-time streaming, voice agents).
• Experience building customer support or conversational AI systems.
• Following the latest research in speech and LLMs and translating papers into production wins.
• Familiarity with low-resource language challenges.
• Fluent in English (bilingual in French is a significant bonus!).

You Might Be a Good Fit If You

• Are comfortable navigating ambiguity and can design agent systems end-to-end without detailed specifications.
• Obsess over evaluation – you've built frameworks to detect hallucinations, measure groundedness, and understand when to trust your system.
• Balance research intuition with pragmatic engineering; you ship working systems, not just prototypes.

About Engineering at Wave

We care about the big picture. We hire engineers to solve problems, not just ship tickets. This means deeply caring about outcomes, understanding context, and addressing issues wherever they arise, even if technically outside your direct area. When we identify problems, inefficiencies, or opportunities for improvement, we act. We delve into operational issues, clarify vague product specifications, or contribute to unfamiliar codebases to unblock teammates.

We move as fast as possible because speed matters. It allows us to iterate quickly, get early feedback, and course-correct efficiently. Therefore, we write small PRs, aim for MVPs, use TODOs, and file follow-ups. We avoid over-perfecting version 1. However, as we build a financial product, certain aspects like money movement, correctness, and security demand greater caution.

We like boring technology. We prefer reliable, well-understood, and easily debuggable tools. This helps us focus on solving meaningful problems rather than contending with unpredictable infrastructure. While we consider new technologies that enable faster development, safer builds, or address a genuine need, we adopt tools because they are right, not merely because they are new.

Simplicity is our strategy. It directs our energy to what matters most: serving our users.

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, along with remote team members worldwide.
• We are deeply passionate about our mission of providing radically affordable financial services to those who need them most.
• We foster employee autonomy. You will own your projects from problem understanding to monitoring solutions in production.
• We raised Africa's largest Series A in 2021, with world-class investors including Founders Fund, Sequoia Heritage, Stripe, Ribbit Capital, Y Combinator, and Partech Africa.
• We are recognized on Y Combinator's top companies by revenue list.

How to Apply

Fill out the form below and upload a resume in English and a cover letter detailing your interest in Wave and this role. We review applications frequently and recommend applying to the role that best 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.

Key skills/competency

• Machine Learning
• Large Language Models (LLMs)
• Voice AI (ASR, TTS)
• Prompt Engineering
• Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RAG)
• Python
• Backend Engineering
• MLOps
• Scalability
• Customer Support Automation