Lead AI Engineer

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.
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Posted on 12 Oct 09:45, Closing date 11 Dec