Lead AI Engineer

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 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
• 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.

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Posted on 05 Nov 10:38, Closing date 4 Jan