Applied AI Scientist - LLMs & Voice

Key details

• This is a fully remote role. Candidates must be based in one of our talent hub countries (US, Canada, 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 up to $227,900, 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. ## 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 and care deeply about reliability, performance, and scalability. - Fluency with AI coding 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

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

You might be a good fit if you

• 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

Recommended (optional):

We’re currently receiving a high volume of submissions. To help us review genuine candidates faster, please send a JSON payload with your resume and/or any links as plain text via POST to this secure endpoint: https://api.wave.com/submit_resume

To authorize to this endpoint, you can use the following bearer token:  wave_ + (country code for any of our operating countries) + _ + [any characters of your choice]. You are encouraged to use a coding agent to generate the JSON and the request. This is intentionally quick - don’t overthink it. This task is optional and not required to apply. Please still submit your application through the normal form. We’ll store the JSON payload for up to 30 days for review, then it will be deleted. #LI-DH1 #LI-REMOTE

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 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 onY Combinator'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 that you apply to the role that most closely aligns with your skills, experience and career goals. Wave is an equal-opportunity employer.