Applied AI Scientist - LLMs & Voice at Wave

Wave (YC W12) is making Africa the first cashless continent by building affordable, instant financial services for millions of users. We're the largest financial institution in Senegal and Cote d'Ivoire and are growing rapidly across 9 countries.

We are looking for an Applied AI Scientist with 5+ years of experience and deep expertise in building, evaluating, and optimizing autonomous agents. You'll work on autonomous voice and digital agents powering 10M+ interactions monthly and will own features end to end, tackling hard edge cases like low-resource languages, low literacy, and poor connectivity.

Responsibilities

Bridge research and production by building AI models and agent systems for shipping into real products

Architect, evaluate, and optimize autonomous voice and digital agents powering 10M+ customer interactions per month

Build for edge cases including poor connectivity, low literacy, and low-resource languages

Experiment with and integrate latest voice and text models

Own problems end-to-end from discovery through production

Requirements

5+ years AI/ML engineering experience

Strong Python and backend engineering skills

Proven hands-on LLM experience (prompt engineering, RAG, embeddings, fine-tuning, agent orchestration)

Track record moving ML models from prototype to production

Fluency with AI coding agents for production systems

Bonus: speech/LLM research background, Voice AI experience, customer support AI systems, low-resource language familiarity

Salary up to $227,900 + equity. Benefits include 6 months parental leave, $10k charity match.