Security engineer

We're making Africa the first cashless continent. We're solving this by building financial services that just work: no account fees, instantly available, and accepted everywhere. 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. 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.
• 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.
• 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 including privileged access management
• Rework our approach to secrets management with ephemeral secrets and tighter access scopes
• Security review of our public-facing APIs
• You'll be responsible for your own security projects as well as supporting the engineering organisation on security through advice and design review.
• you'll typically be in charge of your projects from planning to delivery.

• Minimum of 7-8 years of professional experience with a minimum of 3-5 years of it spent in a security-related role
• Strong Experience with Python.
• Fluent English.
• 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
• 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 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.
• Are interested in security-focused source code review and penetration testing.
• Have an interest in growing and mentoring a team.
• Будет плюсом: 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

• You can work remotely from anywhere (between UTC -5 and +4) with reliable internet access.
• Wave covers travel once per year to one of our operating countries in Africa, as well as a yearly stipend of $1200 to meet with coworkers.
• Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, depending on your level of experience, we offer a salary of up to $185,800 USD (or local equivalent), plus a generous equity.
• 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
• Subsidized health insurance for you and your dependents and retirement contributions (both vary from country-to-country).
• 6 months fully paid parental leave and subsidized fertility assistance.
• Flexible vacation, with most folks taking between 30-40 days per year.
• $10,000 annual charitable donation matching.
• Yearly travel to one of our African operating countries.
• You'll report to the Security Team Lead and work closely with the CISO, as part of a small 4 person security team, likely rotating with many of our Product and Platform teams, depending on the project you’re working on.
• We organize things to give you as much ownership as possible, so you'll typically be in charge of your projects from planning to delivery.