The Applied AI Scientist - LLMs & Voice at © Wave Mobile Money Inc. will bridge AI research and production by developing autonomous voice and digital agents that power over 10 million customer interactions per month across West Africa. This role tackles deep technical challenges in low-connectivity, low-literacy, and low-resource language settings, driving solutions from problem discovery to production deployment.
What You'll Do
- Bridge research and production by 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.
What We're Looking For
- 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
- Fluent in English
Nice to Have
- 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
- Bilingual in French is a big bonus
Technical Stack
Python 3 (+ mypy), GraphQL, Kotlin/Jetpack, Swift/SwiftUI, TypeScript/React, Postgres, CockroachDB, GCP, Terraform, Kubernetes
Team & Environment
Join a rapidly growing team with in-country presence across 9 African countries and remote members globally, part of the Support Automation product team reporting to product and engineering leaders. We value autonomy, speed, simplicity, and ownership — solving real problems over shipping tickets.
Benefits & Compensation
- Subsidized health insurance for you and your dependents
- Retirement contributions (both vary from country to country)
- 6 months of fully paid parental leave
- Subsidized fertility assistance
- Flexible vacation, with most folks taking between 21–30 days exclusive of statutory holidays
- $10,000 annual charitable donation matching
- Yearly $1,200 stipend to support coworking meetups with teammates
- Remote team members expected to travel to operational markets (e.g. Senegal or Côte d'Ivoire) at least once a year
Compensation includes a salary of up to $227,900 depending on level and location, plus a generous equity package.
Work Mode
Fully remote role open to candidates in the US, Canada, UK, Spain, Kenya, Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and Burkina Faso. Annual travel to operational markets is required.
Wave is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.
