[Hiring] Machine Learning Scientist @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. As a Machine Learning Engineer on our product support team, you will:

• Architect and ship autonomous voice and digital agents that power 10M+ customer interactions per month across West Africa.
• Own end-to-end agent systems from core models through multi-channel orchestration, architecting solutions that work reliably where connectivity is poor, literacy can be low, and most languages lack training data.
• Drive real ownership, from problem discovery to running in production, working alongside product and engineering leaders who prioritize shipping real customer impact.
• Shape the future by solving genuinely hard technical problems where systems either work or they fail.

If you're energized by ownership, thrive on deep technical challenges, and want to build infrastructure that serves millions in emerging markets, let's talk.

Qualifications

• 5 years of ML experience
• Strong proficiency in Python and common ML libraries
• Solid theoretical foundation in stats and ML
• Experience working with voice agents
• Proven hands-on experience building with LLMs or NLP systems (prompt engineering, RAG, embeddings, fine-tuning, etc.)
• Experience taking ML models from prototype to production and care deeply about reliability, performance, and scalability
• Fluent in English (bilingual in French is a big bonus!)

Requirements

• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and designing ML systems end-to-end without needing extremely detailed requirements
• Understand the trade-offs between cutting-edge research and pragmatic engineering, and can choose the right tool for the job
• Like working with large datasets, complex pipelines, and modern ML infra (distributed training, feature stores, monitoring, etc.)

Benefits

• Subsidized health insurance for you and your dependents and retirement contributions (both vary from country to country)
• 6 months of fully paid parental leave and subsidized fertility assistance
• Flexible vacation, with most folks taking between 21-30 days exclusive of statutory holidays
• $10,000 annual charitable donation matching

Key details

• This is a fully remote role. Candidates must be based in one of our talent hub countries (UK, Spain, Kenya and Ghana) or in one of our operating markets in Africa including Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, or Burkina Faso.
• Wave provides a yearly $1,200 stipend to support coworking meetups with teammates.
• Remote team members are expected to travel to our operational markets (e.g. Senegal or Côte d'Ivoire) at least once a year. Exceptions apply, but we’ve found this key to understanding our users and product.
• Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, depending on your level and location, we offer a salary between $152,100 - $178,200 USD, plus a generous equity package.

About engineering at Wave

• We care about the big picture.
• We don’t hire engineers to just ship tickets. We hire them to solve problems.
• We move as fast as possible.
• Speed matters. It lets us try things quickly, get feedback early, and course-correct while it’s cheap.
• We like boring technology.
• We favor tools that are reliable, well-understood, and easy to debug.
• Simplicity is a strategy. It lets us focus our energy where it matters most: serving our users.

Our team

We have a rapidly growing in-country team in Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Uganda, Niger, Sierra Leone, and Cameroon plus remote team members spread across the world. We're deeply passionate about our mission of bringing radically affordable financial services to the people who need them most.

How to apply

Fill out the form below, and upload a resume in English and a cover letter describing your interest in Wave and the role. We review applications frequently and recommend that you apply to the role that most closely aligns with your skills, experience and career goals. Wave is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.