[Hiring] AI Security Engineer @Wave

Role Description

Wave is now the largest financial institution in Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire, with millions of users, growing rapidly year-on-year. We’re looking for an experienced security engineer who’s independent, excited about getting things done, and ready to hit the ground running. You'll primarily be responsible for our application security, working with our product teams to enhance our security posture. Our customers trust us with their money, and you’ll be at the forefront of making sure we retain that trust!

This broadly scoped role will allow you to get your hands on many different types of security projects, including:

• Direct application security
• Helping our infrastructure team think about security for our databases
• Defining and enforcing guardrails around AI-powered agents

Some recent projects and activities include:

• Designing our agentic SIEM/SecOps pipelines to evaluate and tune AI-driven triage, alerting, and response automation
• Securing our MCP integrations against prompt injection, tool misuse, and credential exposure
• Tuning and maintaining code security review agents tailored to Wave's codebase, threat model, and regulatory environment
• Developing internal AI governance standards covering acceptable use, data handling, and audit requirements for LLM-powered tools
• Centralizing application-level login and permissions enforcement
• Increasing our posture around secret management
• Conducting security reviews of our public-facing APIs

Qualifications

• Minimum of 5 years of professional experience with at least 2 years in a security-related role
• Strong experience with Python
• Fluent in English

Requirements

• Excited about finding the right balance between security and velocity
• Have opinions on how to secure agentic AI systems
• Interested in building governance frameworks for AI usage in a regulated financial services environment
• Have experimented with LLM-based security tooling
• Push through hard problems without giving up
• Experience remediating non-conformities
• Enjoy helping other engineers understand and implement secure patterns
• Not afraid to take on complicated systems
• Excited to work on various security-related tasks, from audits to code refactors
• Work to make things easier for the next engineer who will touch your code
• Always try to improve as a programmer and colleague
• Interested in security-focused source code review and penetration testing
• Have an interest in growing and mentoring a team

Benefits

• Fully remote role, with candidates based in talent hub countries (U.S, UK, Spain, Kenya, Ghana) or operating markets in Africa (Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso)
• Yearly $1,200 stipend for coworking meetups
• Remote team members expected to travel to operational markets at least once a year
• Competitive salaries calculated using a transparent formula, with a salary of up to $227,900 USD plus a generous equity package
• Subsidized health insurance for you and your dependents
• Retirement contributions (vary by country)
• 6 months of fully paid parental leave and subsidized fertility assistance
• Flexible vacation, with most taking between 21-30 days exclusive of statutory holidays
• $10,000 annual charitable donation matching

Company Description

Wave is committed to bringing radically affordable financial services to the people who need them most. We foster autonomy for our employees, allowing them to own their projects at every stage. We raised the largest Series A in Africa in 2021, with world-class investors including Founders Fund, Sequoia Heritage, Stripe, Ribbit Capital, Y Combinator, and Partech Africa.

We are on Y Combinator's top companies by revenue.