Applied AI Scientist - LLMs & Voice

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

• Be responsible for driving the quality of our automated support through evaluating and improving everything the team builds

• Bridge research and production, building agent systems that ship into real products.

• Contribute to autonomous voice and digital agents that power 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.

• This is a fully remote role. Candidates must be based in one of our talent hub countries (US, 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 between $167,00 - $227,900 USD, 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 experience

• Proven hands-on experience building with LLMs or AI systems (evaluation, RAG, embeddings, safety and guardrails etc.) .

• Strong foundations in statistics and ML theory.

• Solid Python skills.

• Track record taking AI/ML systems from prototype to production and care deeply about reliability, performance, and scalability.

• Fluency with AI agents, with bonus points for deploying them as part of production systems

• Bonus points:

• 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

• Building in high-risk agent environments like finance

• Fluent in English, (bilingual in French is a big bonus!)

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• Are comfortable navigating ambiguity and designing AI 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.

• Like working with large datasets, complex pipelines, and modern ML infra (distributed training, feature stores, monitoring, etc.)

• 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 spread across the world.

• We're deeply passionate about our mission of bringing radically affordable financial services to the people who need them most.

• We foster autonomy for our employees. You'll own your projects at every stage, from understanding the problem to monitoring your solution in production.

• We raised the largest Series A in Africa in 2021. Our world-class investors, include Founders Fund, Sequoia Heritage, Stripe, Ribbit Capital, Y Combinator, and Partech Africa.

• We are on Y Combinator's top companies by revenue.