Our client is looking for a Player-coach technical Lead AI Engineer who owns delivery of major AI product areas, reporting to the Head of AI. Ships substantial code, sets engineering standards, mentors the team, and drives production quality across voice AI, automated call QA, and future text channels.
Responsibilities:
Own end-to-end delivery for one or more major areas (voice agents, speech/LLM QA pipelines, post-call intelligence, or text-channel agents)Partner with the head of AI on architecture, priorities, and production risk; turn decisions into shipped systemsLead prompt/agent design, structured LLM outputs, evaluation/regression suites, and operational reliability (latency, cost, failure handling, observability)Drive post-call intelligence quality: scoring accuracy, structured output reliability, and pipeline performanceMentor senior → junior engineers through design reviews, pairing, and code reviewCollaborate with the platform portal team so campaigns, dashboards, and QA surfaces stay aligned with the AI runtimeWork with Azure DevOps on deployability, GPU/LLM cost trade-offs, and production operationsUse and champion AI coding tools (e.g. Cursor, Claude) to raise team speed and qualityQualifications and experience:
7+ years software engineering; 3+ years shipping LLM and/or speech + LLM systems to productionStrong production PythonDeep experience in at least two of: voice/conversational agents, speech pipelines (STT/diarization/VAD), LLM evaluation, multi-agent/tool-calling systemsSolid Azure experience (serverless and/or Kubernetes, queues/messaging, blob storage, SQL, secrets/identity)Prompt engineering for multi-step, compliance-sensitive workflowsProven player-coach leadership in a small agile teamExperience with AI coding assistants such as Cursor, Claude, or similar Experience with AI coding assistants such as Cursor, Claude, or similarVoice platform experience and STT/TTS vendor tuningWhisper / diarization / vLLM / OpenAI Batch / structured outputsContact-centre, collections, or BPO domain experienceObservability (Application Insights, Grafana) and CI/CD collaborationWhatsApp / email bot experienceThe reference number for this position is NG61522 which is a permanent, Hybrid role in Sandton, Johannesburg offering a salary of up to R1.4mil per annum salary negotiable based on experience. E-mail Nokuthula on [[nokuthulag@ e-Merge.co.za]] or call her for a chat on 011 463 3633 to discuss this and other opportunities.
Are you ready for a change of scenery? E-Merge IT recruitment is a niche recruitment agency. We offer our candidates options so that we can successfully place the right people with the right companies, in the right roles. Check out the e-Merge IT website www.e-merge.co.za for more great positions.
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