Lead AI Engineer (Johannesburg)

15 hours ago 7

Work From Home - Earn Something By Just Working At Home

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 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 and 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
Contact-centre, collections, or BPO domain experience
Observability (Application Insights, Grafana) and CI/CD collaboration
WhatsApp / email bot experience

The 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 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

Posted on 28 Sep 09:25, Closing date 27 Nov

Or apply with your Biz CV

Create your CV once, and thereafter you can apply to this ad and future job ads easily.

e-Merge is a service orientated, boutique agency working in specific technology verticals. We only recruit within our specialised fields, assuring both client and candidate of expert attention, knowledge and advice.