Lead AI LLM Engineer (Sandton)

1 hour ago 2

Work From Home - Earn Something By Just Working At Home

Ready to take the lead in building the next generation of AI-powered solutions?

This is an exciting opportunity for a Lead AI Engineer to join a dynamic technology environment where cutting-edge AI is being turned into real-world, production-ready solutions. You’ll work across LLMs, voice agents, speech technologies, automated testing, AI coding tools, and modern software development practices, while taking ownership of key technical initiatives and helping shape the future of conversational AI.
If you’re a hands-on technical leader who enjoys solving complex engineering challenges, mentoring others, and turning innovative ideas into scalable production systems, this could be the opportunity you’ve been looking for.

Must-have skills 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

Strong advantages:

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

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
Design and build production Python services on Azure (Functions and/or Kubernetes workers, messaging, storage, SQL-backed outcomes)
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

Reference number for this position is GZ61522 which is a permanent position based in Sandton offering a salary of R1.5m per annum, negotiable based on experience and ability.
Contact Garth on az.oc.egrem-e@zhtrag or call 011 463 3633 to discuss this and other opportunities.
Are you ready for a change of scenery? We are a specialist niche recruitment agency. We offer our candidates a wide range of opportunities, ensuring we successfully match the right technology professionals with the right roles.
Do you know a developer or technology specialist looking for a new opportunity? We pay cash for successful referrals!

Posted on 08 Sep 15:13, Closing date 7 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.