Applied AI Scientist - LLMs & Voice

The role

You will drive the quality of automated support by building agent systems that ship into real products. You will contribute to autonomous voice and digital agents for customer interactions across West Africa.

What you will do

• Drive the quality of automated support through evaluating and improving everything the team builds
• Bridge research and production by building agent systems that ship into real products
• Contribute to autonomous voice and digital agents
• Build for 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

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in AI/ML experience
• Proven hands-on experience building with LLMs or AI systems (evaluation, RAG, embeddings, safety and guardrails etc.)
• Strong foundations in statistics and ML theory
• Solid Python skills
• Track record taking AI/ML systems from prototype to production

Nice to have

• Fluency with AI agents, with bonus points for deploying them as part of production systems
• 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
• Building in high-risk agent environments like finance
• Fluent in English, (bilingual in French is a big bonus!)

Benefits

• Subsidized health insurance for you and your dependents
• Retirement contributions
• 6 months of fully paid parental leave
• Subsidized fertility assistance
• Flexible vacation
• $10,000 annual charitable donation matching
• Up to three in-person get-togethers a year

Before you apply

• Candidates must be based in one of our talent hub countries (US, UK, Spain, Kenya and Ghana) or in one of our operating markets in Africa including Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, or Burkina Faso
• Upload a resume in English and a cover letter

About the company

Wave is making Africa the first cashless continent by building financial services that work without account fees. They have millions of users across 9 countries.