AI Security Engineer at Wavemm1

Our mission We're making Africa the first cashless continent. In 2017, over half the population in Sub-Saharan Africa had no bank account. That's for good reason—the fees are too high, the closest branch can be miles away, and nobody takes cards. Without access to financial institutions, people are forced to keep their savings under the mattress. Small business owners rely on lenders who charge extortionate rates. Parents spend hours waiting in line to pay school fees in cash. We're solving this by building financial services that just work: no account fees, instantly available, and accepted everywhere. In places where electricity, water and roads don't always work, you can still send money with Wave. In 2017, we launched a mobile app in Senegal for cash deposit, withdrawal, and peer-to-peer and business payments. Now, we have millions of users across 9 countries and are growing fast. Our goal is to make Africa the first cashless continent and that's where you come in... How you'll help us achieve it Wave is now the largest financial institution in Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire, with millions of users, growing rapidly year-on-year. 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 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 work on new systems 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, from direct application security to helping our infrastructure team think about security for our databases. As we integrate AI-powered agents into our engineering and operations workflows, you'll help define and enforce the guardrails around how we use them safely. This includes securing agentic tooling against prompt injection, excessive permissions, and data exfiltration — and building the 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. Our to-do list changes constantly, but here are some recent projects and activities: • Design our agentic SIEM/SecOps pipelines to evaluate and tune AI-driven triage, alerting, and response automation • Secure our MCP integrations against prompt injection, tool misuse, and credential exposure, tune and maintain code security review agents tailored to Wave's codebase, threat model, and regulatory environment • Develop internal AI governance standards covering acceptable use, data handling, and audit requirements for LLM-powered tools • Centralise application-level login and permissions enforcement • Help us increase our posture around secret management • Security review of our public-facing APIs 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/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 (U.S, 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 (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. • 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 up to $227,900 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 • Minimum of 5 years of professional experience with a minimum of 2 years of it spent in a security-related role. • Strong Experience with Python. • Fluent English. You might be a good fit if you • Are excited about finding the right balance between security and velocity. • Have opinions on how to secure agentic AI systems and want to put them into practice. • Are interested in building governance frameworks for AI usage in a regulated financial services environment. • Have experimented with LLM-based security tooling and understand both the promise and the failure modes. • Push through hard problems without giving up. • Have experience remediating non-conformities. • Enjoy helping other engineers understand and implement secure patterns. • Are not afraid to take on complicated systems. • Are excited to work on lots of different security-related work, 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. • Are interested in security-focused source code review and penetration testing. • Have an interest in growing and mentoring a team. 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 Our team • We have a rapidly growing in-country team in Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Uganda, Niger, Sierra Leone, and Cameroon plus remote team members spread across the world. • We're deeply passionate about our mission of bringing radically affordable financial services to the people who need them most. • We foster autonomy for our employees. You'll own your projects at every stage, from understanding the problem to monitoring your solution in production. • We raised the largest Series A in Africa in 2021. Our world-class investors, include Founders Fund, Sequoia Heritage, Stripe, Ribbit Capital, Y Combinator, and Partech Africa. • We are on Y Combinator's top companies by revenue. How to apply Fill out the form below, and upload a resume in English and a cover letter describing your interest in Wave and the role. We review applications frequently and recommend that you apply to the role that most closely aligns with your skills, experience and career goals. Wave is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.