Data Scientist

How you'll help us achieve it

We’re looking for an experienced Data Scientist to join our team. You’ll work on projects across the business, from building credit scoring models and improving fraud detection to optimizing field visit schedules and designing A/B tests for targeted user promotions.

In this role, you’ll partner with product managers and business leaders to understand the problems they’re trying to solve and find practical ways to use data to improve outcomes. Our ideal candidate is product-minded, scrappy and thinks about data in terms of intuitive user behaviours rather than just inputs to a black box model.

In this role you’ll;

• Be embedded closely with our product and operations teams.
• Generate insights using customer, merchant and internal data using statistical modelling, data visualization, and machine learning.

• Design, implement and analyze optimizations for our internal operations, user promos, and agent network to help teams scale and reduce costs.

• Build data-driven heuristics and machine-learning models to improve user and business outcomes.
• Take ownership of the analytics process - from project scoping and design to communicating findings to stakeholders.

Key details

• This is a fully remote role. 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.
• Wave is a distributed team, and we fund up to three in-person get-togethers a year, in line with Wave's travel policy.
• Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, depending on your level and location, we offer a salary between $130,600 - $236,200 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 30-40 days per year. 
• $10,000 annual charitable donation matching.

Requirements

• Education and Experience
  
  • Minimum Bachelor's degree in a quantitative field such as Statistics, Mathematics, Economics, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline. A Master's or PhD is a plus.  
  • 5+ years of experience in data science, machine learning or technical analytics roles.
• Technical Skills  
  • Deep expertise with Python, SQL, and data visualization tools
  • Experience in one or more of the following: machine learning, causal inference, statistical modeling, or A/B testing. Experience applying these methods in operational settings with offline components (example: incentive structures for field staff) is a plus.
  • Highly effective written communication and presentation skills
  • A track record of translating complex data into clear, actionable insights for both technical and business stakeholder
• Fluency in English. French is a plus.

You might be a good fit if you

• Have a bias for action and ability to thrive in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where you must create clarity and drive forward progress.
• Have worked in early stage product teams (or a rapidly scaling product) and are able to drive product decisions. 
• Have excellent focus, prioritizing your research and work using an iterative approach (you know when a project is good enough to stop, and you rarely get lost in details).
• Are able to compellingly present your findings to technical and non-technical audiences and make proactive recommendations based on data.