Wave Mobile Money is on a mission to make Africa the first cashless continent by providing accessible financial services. As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you will bridge research and production by building AI models and agent systems that enhance customer support, impacting millions of users across West Africa.
Responsibilities:
- Bridge research and production, 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
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
- Fluent in English (bilingual in French is a big bonus!)
- 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