# Lead AI Engineer – Sandton, Johannesburg – up to R1.4mil per annum

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Company: e-Merge Recruitment

Category: Banking & Financial Services

Location: South Africa

Work type: Full-time

Work arrangement: On-site

Published: 2026-11-05

Expires: 2026-12-20

## 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.

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.

Do you have a friend who is a developer or technology specialist? We pay cash for successful referrals

## Requirements

Apply by email: nokuthulag@e-merge.co.za

## Apply

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