[Hiring] Senior Application Security Engineer @Wave

Role Description

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
• Securing agentic tooling against prompt injection, excessive permissions, and data exfiltration
• Building policies and technical controls to govern AI usage across the company

Some experience with common industry certifications like ISO-27001 and PCI-DSS would be beneficial, although you won’t be expected to run or oversee audits.

Recent projects 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 including privileged access management
• Reworking our approach to secrets management with ephemeral secrets and tighter access scopes
• Conducting security reviews of our public-facing APIs

Qualifications

• Minimum of 7-8 years of professional experience
• Minimum of 3-5 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
• 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 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
• Have experience remediating non-conformities
• Interested in security-focused source code review and penetration testing
• Have an interest in growing and mentoring a team

Benefits

• Remote work from anywhere (between UTC -5 and +4) with reliable internet access
• Travel coverage once per year to one of our operating countries in Africa
• Yearly stipend of $1200 to meet with coworkers
• Competitive salaries calculated using a transparent formula, up to $185,800 USD (or local equivalent)
• Generous equity
• Performance reviews twice a year with bonuses or promotions for strong performers
• Subsidized health insurance for you and your dependents
• Retirement contributions (vary by country)
• 6 months fully paid parental leave and subsidized fertility assistance
• Flexible vacation, with most taking between 30-40 days per year
• $10,000 annual charitable donation matching
• Yearly travel to one of our African operating countries

Company Description

We are making Africa the first cashless continent. In 2017, over half the population in Sub-Saharan Africa had no bank account due to high fees and lack of access. We launched a mobile app in Senegal for cash deposit, withdrawal, and peer-to-peer and business payments, and now have millions of users across 9 countries.

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.