Senior Machine Learning Scientist - LLM & Voice

Our mission: We're making Africa the first cashless continent. We're solving financial access problems by building financial services that just work: no account fees, instantly available, and accepted everywhere. Wave is now the largest financial institution in Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire, with millions of users. As a Senior Machine Learning Scientist on our Support Automation product team, you'll: 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. Our stack: backend: Python 3 (+ mypy), API layer: GraphQL, android frontend: Kotlin/Jetpack, iOS frontend: Swift/SwiftUI, web frontend: TypeScript/React, database: Postgres/CockroachDB, infrastructure: GCP/Terraform, orchestration: Kubernetes. Key details: This is a fully remote role. Candidates must be based in one of our talent hub countries (US, Canada, 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 at least once a year. Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, depending on your level and location, we offer a salary up to $227,900, plus a generous equity package. Major benefits: Subsidized health insurance for you and your dependents and retirement contributions, 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. 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. Bonus points: 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, Fluent in English (bilingual in French is a big bonus!). You might be a good fit if you: Are comfortable navigating ambiguity and can design agent systems end-to-end without detailed specs, Obsess over evaluation – you've built frameworks to catch hallucinations, measure groundedness, and know when to trust your system, Balance research intuition with pragmatic engineering; you ship working systems, not just prototypes.