Applied AI Scientist - LLMs & Voice

Wave is seeking an Applied AI Scientist to join our Support Automation product team. In this role, you will bridge research and production by building AI models and agent systems that ship into real products. You will architect, evaluate, and optimize autonomous voice and digital agents powering over 10 million customer interactions per month across West Africa. This position offers the opportunity to work on challenging edge cases, including poor connectivity, low literacy, and languages with limited training data.

Key responsibilities include experimenting with, evaluating, and integrating the latest voice and text models. You will own problems end-to-end, from problem discovery to running in production, working alongside product and engineering leaders who prioritize shipping real customer impact. Our technology stack includes Python 3 (+ mypy) for backend development, GraphQL for the API layer, and various frontend and infrastructure technologies.

The ideal candidate will have over 5 years of experience in AI/ML engineering, strong Python and backend engineering skills, and a solid foundation in statistics and machine learning theory. Proven hands-on experience building with large language models (LLMs), including prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), embeddings, fine-tuning, and agent orchestration, is essential. A track record of taking ML models from prototype to production with a focus on reliability, performance, and scalability is also required. Fluency with AI coding agents and proficiency in English are necessary; bilingualism in French is a significant advantage.

This is a fully remote role open to candidates based in the US, Canada, UK, Spain, Kenya, Ghana, or in our operating markets in Africa, including Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, or Burkina Faso. Wave offers a competitive salary up to $227,900, depending on level and location, plus a generous equity package. Benefits include subsidized health insurance, retirement contributions, six months of fully paid parental leave, flexible vacation, and a $10,000 annual charitable donation matching program. Remote team members are expected to travel to our operational markets at least once a year to better understand our users and product.