Applied AI Engineer

Overview

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…

Wave is now the largest financial institution in Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, with millions of users, growing rapidly year on year. And, we’re still in the early days of our product roadmap and potential impact on people’s everyday lives.

We're helping millions of customers across West Africa access financial services through mobile money, and great support is fundamental to that. We believe the future of customer support lies in machines handling boring repetitive tasks so humans can focus on high value interactions that require empathy and creativity.

• Bridge research and production, building AI models and agent systems that ship into real products.
• Architect, evaluate, and optimize autonomous voice and digital agents powering 10M+ customer interactions per month across West Africa.
• Build for the hardest edge cases: poor connectivity, low literacy, and languages with little training data.
• Experiment with, evaluate, and integrate the latest voice and text models.
• Own problems end-to-end, from problem discovery to running in production, working alongside product and engineering leaders who prioritize shipping real customer impact.

If you're energized by ownership, thrive on deep technical challenges, and want to build infrastructure that serves millions in emerging markets, let's talk.

• backend:
  Python 3 (+ mypy)
• API layer:
  GraphQL
• android frontend:
  Kotlin/Jetpack
• iOS frontend:
  Swift/SwiftUI
• web frontend:
  Type Script/React
• database:
  Postgres/Cockroach DB
• infrastructure: GCP/Terraform
• orchestration:
  Kubernetes

• 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 including 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 key to understanding our users and product.
• Our salaries are competitive and are 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:
  • Subsidized health insurance for you and your dependents and retirement contributions (both vary from country to country).
  • 6 months of fully paid parental leave and subsidized fertility assistance.
  • Flexible vacation, with most folks taking between 21-30 days exclusive of statutory holidays.
  • $10,000 annual charitable donation matching.

• 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 taking ML models from prototype to production and care deeply about reliability, performance, and scalability.
• Fluency with AI coding agents, with bonus points for deploying them as part of production systems
• Bonus…