Software Engineer, Wave
DevEx-LLM Focus
$178.2k
+ Equity + Bonuses
Financial services for underbanked communities
Open for applications
Financial services for underbanked communities
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$178.2k
+ Equity + Bonuses
1001+ employees
Company mission
To make Africa the first cashless continent.
Role
Who you are
- We’re looking for an experienced engineer passionate about developer productivity and applied AI
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Proven hands-on experience building with LLMs or NLP systems (prompt engineering, RAG, embeddings, fine-tuning, etc.)
- Strong programming skills (Python strongly preferred)
- Experience deploying and monitoring services in cloud environments
- Fluency in English (French is a bonus)
Desirable
- Get excited about using AI to improve developer productivity and keeping up with new developments
- Can balance rapid prototyping with reliable engineering practices
- Care deeply about maintainability, developer experience, and making tools a joy to use
- Have experience in platform engineering, DevOps, or internal developer tooling
- Communicate clearly with colleagues from diverse backgrounds
- Are excited to deeply understand the inner workings of the tools you use
- 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
- Infrastructure: GCP/Terraform
- Orchestration: Kubernetes
What the job involves
- Wave is now the largest financial institution in Senegal, with over 7 million users. And, we’re still in the early days of our product roadmap and potential impact on people’s everyday lives
- You’ll be responsible for owning and driving the research, prototyping, and integrating LLM-powered tools that improve our internal engineering workflows
- This is the first hire in this new area, we are looking for someone who can own the direction of our internal applied AI tooling and ensure it solves the right problems
- You’ll be part of the Developer Experience team and work closely with Product and Platform teams to:
- Participate in the DevEx on-duty rotation, identify pain points in our Software Development Life Cycle and prototype AI-driven solutions
- Build internal tooling powered by LLMs (e.g., code review assistants, automated documentation, test generation)
- Partner with engineers across Wave to accelerate company-wide LLM adoption
- Evaluate and refine prompt strategies, fine-tuning, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines
- Ensure quality, reliability, future scalability and security of AI-assisted developer workflows
- Our to-do list changes constantly, but here are some potential projects:
- Prototyping an AI code review assistant that flags common issues and suggests fixes
- Building embeddings-based code search to improve the onboarding of new engineers and the general understanding of our codebase
- Creating an internal developer knowledge assistant to resolve engineering issues faster
- Own the internal vibe-coding infrastructure to ensure it’s secure and enables users to easily create new services
Application process
- 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
Our take
Because of things like high fees and a lack of local branches, about half of the adults in Africa still do not have a bank account. Although this is an improvement on past estimates, the continent is still significantly underbanked - which is what Wave helps to combat.
Wave addresses this banking gap with technology, offering a straightforward and cost-effective tool accessible via mobile. The impact has been substantial. A 2021 GSMA report suggested over 500 million mobile money accounts were registered in Africa, facilitating transactions valued at nearly $500 billion.
Wave has already established its presence in Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Gambia and Mali, using steady investment to expand its footprint and reach unicorn status. It also continues to enhance product development and engineering efforts, as well as shore up business operations. Despite challenger companies emerging, Wave has a considerable head start on the competition.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
9% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Mar 2022
$10m
LATE VC
Sep 2021
$200m
SERIES A
Total funding: $210.2m
Company benefits
- Subsidised health insurance for you and your dependents (vary from country to country)
- 6 months fully paid parental leave and subsidized fertility assistance
- Flexible vacation, with most folks taking between 30-40 days per year
- $10,000 annual charitable donation matching
- Retirement contributions (vary from country to country)
- Yearly travel to one of our African operating countries
Company HQ
Mermoz Sacre-coeur, Dakar, Dakar Region
Leadership
Drew Durbin
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously co-founder and CEO at Sendwave (International Remittance).
Lincoln Quirk
(Co-Founder)Previously co-founder and CTO at Newsbrane, Engineer at Demiurge Studios and co-founder of Sendwave (International Remittance).
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