Lead AI Engineer – Sandton, Johannesburg – up to R1.4mil per annum
e-Merge Recruitment
Job description
Our client is seeking a hands-on Technical Lead AI Engineer to lead the development and delivery of key AI product areas, reporting directly to the Head of AI. This player-coach role combines hands-on engineering with technical leadership, requiring the successful candidate to contribute significantly to code development, establish engineering best practices, mentor and guide the team, and ensure high-quality production delivery across Voice AI, automated call quality assurance (QA), and emerging text-based AI 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 systems
- Lead 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 performance
- Mentor Senior → Junior engineers through design reviews, pairing, and code review
- Collaborate with the platform portal team so campaigns, dashboards, and QA surfaces stay aligned with the AI runtime
- Work with Azure DevOps on deployability, GPU/LLM cost trade-offs, and production operations
- Use and champion AI coding tools (e.g. Cursor, Claude) to raise team speed and quality
Qualifications & Experience
- 7+ years software engineering; 3+ years shipping LLM and/or speech + LLM systems to production
- Strong production Python
- Deep experience in at least two of: voice/conversational agents, speech pipelines (STT/diarization/VAD), LLM evaluation, multi-agent/tool-calling systems
- Solid Azure experience (serverless and/or Kubernetes, queues/messaging, blob storage, SQL, secrets/identity)
- Prompt engineering for multi-step, compliance-sensitive workflows
- Proven player-coach leadership in a small agile team
- Experience with AI coding assistants such as Cursor, Claude, or similar Experience with AI coding assistants such as Cursor, Claude, or similar
- Voice platform experience and STT/TTS vendor tuning
- Whisper / diarization / vLLM / OpenAI Batch / structured outputs
- Observability (Application Insights, Grafana) and CI/CD collaboration
- WhatsApp / email bot experience
The Reference Number for this position is NG 61522 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.
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