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. The barriers include high fees, distant branches, and limited card acceptance. Wave is solving this by building financial services that work: no account fees, instantly available, and accepted everywhere. We launched a mobile app in Senegal for cash deposit, withdrawal, and peer-to-peer and business payments, and now have millions of users across 9 countries and growing fast.
Our goal is to make Africa the first cashless continent and you can help us achieve it.
How You'll Help Us Achieve It
Wave is the largest financial institution in Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, with millions of users and rapid growth. We are early in our product roadmap and focused on the impact on people’s everyday lives. We’re helping millions of customers across West Africa access financial services through mobile money, and we believe the future of customer support lies in machines handling repetitive tasks so humans can focus on high-value interactions requiring 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 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.
Stack and Qualifications
Our stack (prior experience 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
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 taking ML models from prototype to production with a focus on reliability, performance, and scalability
* Fluency with AI coding agents; bonus points for deploying them as part of production systems
* Bonus points:
o Research background in speech or LLMs
o Proven Voice AI experience (ASR, TTS, latency optimization, real-time streaming, voice agents)
o Experience building customer support or conversational AI systems
o Familiarity with translating recent papers into production wins
o Familiarity with low-resource language challenges
* Fluent in English (bilingual in French is a big bonus)
You Might Be a Good Fit If
* You’re comfortable navigating ambiguity and can design agent systems end-to-end without detailed specs.
* You obsess over evaluation—built frameworks to catch hallucinations, measure groundedness, and know when to trust your system.
* You balance research intuition with pragmatic engineering and ship working systems, not just prototypes.
About Engineering at Wave
We care about the big picture. We hire engineers to solve problems, understand context, and help unblock teammates. We move fast, write small PRs, and aim for MVPs. Because we’re building a financial product, money movement, correctness, and security deserve caution. We prefer simple, reliable, well-understood tools that help us move faster and solve real needs.
Simplicity is a strategy to focus on 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, plus remote team members worldwide.
* We are passionate about delivering radically affordable financial services to those who need them most.
* We foster autonomy; you’ll own your projects from problem understanding to monitoring in production.
* We raised the largest Series A in Africa in 2021. Investors include Founders Fund, Sequoia Heritage, Stripe, Ribbit Capital, Y Combinator, and Partech Africa.
* We are on YC’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 applying to roles that closely align with your skills and goals.
Wave is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.
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