Applied AI Engineer

Wave Mobile Money is on a mission to make Africa the first cashless continent by providing accessible financial services. As an Applied AI Engineer, you will bridge research and production to build AI models and systems that enhance customer interactions 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