Applied AI Scientist - LLMs & Voice
Wave is a mobile money company reinventing financial services across Africa. It lets users deposit, withdraw, and pay bills for free, send money for a 1% fee, and buy airtime instantly, serving everyday consumers who need affordable, accessible banking.
Projects
About Wave
Wave offers mobile money services designed to make banking modern and affordable, primarily for underserved populations across Africa. Its core product allows users to deposit and withdraw money for free, pay bills for free, send money to anyone for only 1%, and buy airtime instantly, backed by toll-free customer support and strong security. Wave operates across numerous African markets including Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, DRC, Gambia, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Uganda, with a global team building what it describes as 'the future of money, Africa-first.' The company emphasizes a distinct hiring philosophy and culture rooted in transparency, mission-driven work, honesty, and rapid iteration, serving individual consumers and agents who rely on Wave for everyday financial transactions.
Skills
About the Role
You'll bridge research and production by building AI models and agent systems that ship directly into real products. You'll architect and ship autonomous voice and digital agents that power over 10 million customer interactions per month across West Africa. You'll tackle the hardest edge cases, including poor connectivity, low literacy, and languages with little training data. You'll experiment with, evaluate, and integrate the latest voice and text models. You'll own problems end-to-end, from problem discovery through running in production, working alongside product and engineering leaders who prioritize shipping real customer impact.
Requirements
- 5+ years of experience in AI/ML
- Proven hands-on experience building with LLMs or AI systems (prompt engineering, RAG, embeddings, fine-tuning, safety and guardrails etc.)
- Strong foundations in statistics and ML theory
- Solid Python and backend engineering skills
- Track record taking AI/ML systems from prototype to production with a focus on reliability, performance, and scalability
- Fluency with AI coding agents, with bonus points for deploying them as part of production systems
Responsibilities
- Bridge research and production by building AI models and agent systems that ship into real products
- Architect and ship autonomous voice and digital agents that power 10M+ customer interactions per month across West Africa
- Build for the hardest edge cases including 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
Benefits
- Subsidized health insurance for you and your dependents
- Retirement contributions
- 6 months of fully paid parental leave
- Subsidized fertility assistance
- Flexible vacation
- $10,000 annual charitable donation matching
- Yearly $1,200 stipend for coworking meetups with teammates
- Equity package