Applied AI Engineer, Wave
$189.3-227.9k
Plus a generous equity package. Salary may vary depending on location
Financial services for underbanked communities
Be an early applicant
Financial services for underbanked communities
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$189.3-227.9k
Plus a generous equity package. Salary may vary depending on location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To make Africa the first cashless continent.
Role
Who you are
- 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
- 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
- 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
Desirable
- 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
- You follow the latest research in speech and LLMs, and know how to translate papers into production wins
- Familiarity with low-resource language challenges
- Fluent in English (bilingual in French is a big bonus!)
- Are comfortable navigating ambiguity and can design agent systems end-to-end without detailed specs
- Obsess over evaluation – you've built frameworks to catch hallucinations, measure groundedness, and know when to trust your system
- Balance research intuition with pragmatic engineering; you ship working systems, not just prototypes
What the job involves
- 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
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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