Software Engineer (DevEx-LLM Focus)

How you'll help us achieve it

Wave is now the largest financial institution in Senegal, with over 7 million users. And, we’re still in the early days of our product roadmap and potential impact on people’s everyday lives.

We’re looking for an experienced engineer passionate about developer productivity and applied AI. You’ll be responsible for owning and driving the research, prototyping, and integrating LLM-powered tools that improve our internal engineering workflows.

This is the first hire in this new area, we are looking for someone who can own the direction of our internal applied AI tooling and ensure it solves the right problems. 

You’ll be part of the Developer Experience team and work closely with Product and Platform teams to:

• Participate in the DevEx on-duty rotation, identify pain points in our Software Development Life Cycle and prototype AI-driven solutions.
• Build internal tooling powered by LLMs (e.g., code review assistants, automated documentation, test generation).
• Partner with engineers across Wave to accelerate company-wide LLM adoption.
• Evaluate and refine prompt strategies, fine-tuning, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines.
• Ensure quality, reliability, future scalability and security of AI-assisted developer workflows.

Our to-do list changes constantly, but here are some potential projects:

• Prototyping an AI code review assistant that flags common issues and suggests fixes.
• Building embeddings-based code search to improve the onboarding of new engineers and the general understanding of our codebase.
• Creating an internal developer knowledge assistant to resolve engineering issues faster.
• Own the internal vibe-coding infrastructure to ensure it’s secure and enables users to easily create new services.

Our stack (prior experience is a strong plus, but not required):

• backend: Python 3 (+ mypy)
• API layer: GraphQL
• android frontend: Kotlin/Jetpack
• iOS frontend: Swift/SwiftUI
• web frontend: TypeScript/React
• database: Postgres
• infrastructure: GCP/Terraform
• orchestration: Kubernetes

Key Details

• This is a fully remote role. Candidates must be based in one of our talent hub countries (UK, Spain, USA, Canada, 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.
• We run performance reviews twice a year and award bonuses or promotions to strong performers who have been with the company for more than six months.
• Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, depending on your level and location, we offer a salary of $178,200 USD, plus a generous equity package.
• Major 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.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Proven hands-on experience building with LLMs or NLP systems (prompt engineering, RAG, embeddings, fine-tuning, etc.).
• Strong programming skills (Python strongly preferred).
• Experience deploying and monitoring services in cloud environments.
• Fluency in English (French is a bonus).

You might be a good fit if you

• Get excited about using AI to improve developer productivity and keeping up with new developments.
• Can balance rapid prototyping with reliable engineering practices.
• Care deeply about maintainability, developer experience, and making tools a joy to use.
• Have experience in platform engineering, DevOps, or internal developer tooling.
• Communicate clearly with colleagues from diverse backgrounds.
• Are excited to deeply understand the inner workings of the tools you use.

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. That means caring deeply about outcomes, understanding context, and jumping in wherever something’s broken, even if it’s technically “not your area.” When we see problems, inefficiencies, or opportunities to make something better, we act. We dig into operational issues, clarify fuzzy product specs, or step into unfamiliar code to help unblock teammates.

We move as fast as possible. Speed matters. It lets us try things quickly, get feedback early, and course-correct while it’s cheap. So we write small PRs. We aim for MVPs. We leave TODOs and file follow-ups. We don’t over-perfect v1. That said, we’re building a financial product. Some things—like money movement, correctness, or security—deserve more caution.

We like boring technology. We favor tools that are reliable, well-understood, and easy to debug. This keeps us focused on solving meaningful problems instead of wrestling with unpredictable infrastructure. If a new technology helps us move faster, build safer, or solve a real need, we’ll consider it. But we don’t adopt tools just because they’re new—we adopt them because they’re right.

Simplicity is a strategy. It lets us focus our energy where it matters most: serving our users.

#LI-DH1 #LI-REMOTE