Senior AI Engineer

Are you passionate about artificial intelligence and excited about turning cutting-edge AI technologies into real-world business solutions? Do you have the technical expertise to design, build and deliver intelligent systems that make a meaningful impact?
We are looking for an experienced Senior AI Engineer to join an innovative team, driving the development and delivery of advanced AI solutions. This is an exciting opportunity for someone who combines strong software engineering fundamentals with hands-on expertise in Generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and agent-based systems.
The successful candidate will take ownership of technical architecture, lead delivery, mentor engineers and help organisations unlock the value of AI through secure, scalable and production-ready solutions.

Key requirements and experience:

• A degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics, statistics or a related field, or equivalent evidence of expertise.
• 6+ years of experience in software, data or machine learning engineering, with several AI solutions designed and delivered into production.
• Previous software engineering experience will be recognised and valued.
• Expert-level Python skills, strong SQL capabilities and solid software engineering fundamentals.
• Proven hands-on experience building LLM applications, RAG and agent-based systems using Azure OpenAI / AI Foundry, AWS Bedrock or similar platforms.
• Ability to assess and select the right approach between hosted models, open models and classical machine learning.
• Strong understanding of AI evaluation methods, embeddings, vector search and hybrid search.
• Extensive experience with AWS or Azure, together with working knowledge of the other, including networking, identity and cost management.
• Strong experience with CI/CD, containers, infrastructure as code, and running MLOps or LLMOps in production.
• Solid understanding of AI security, responsible AI practices and data-protection legislation, including POPIA.
• Confident use of AI tooling within engineering, with the ability to identify where AI-enabled software adds genuine business value.
• Experience leading technical delivery and mentoring engineers within Agile or Scrum environments.
• Confidence in making architectural decisions and taking ownership of technical solutions.
• Excellent communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical concepts and trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.
• Willingness to mentor and develop others, as well as travel to clients when required.

Nice to have:

• Professional-level cloud, data or AI certifications are strongly preferred, with Monocle support to earn and maintain relevant certifications. Examples include:
• Microsoft AI-102.
• AWS machine learning specialty.
• AWS solutions architect professional.
• Databricks generative AI engineer.
• Experience with Databricks or Microsoft Fabric, including their AI and machine learning capabilities.
• Experience with model fine-tuning or large-scale AI evaluation.
• Exposure to pre-sales activities, client proposals and solution presentations

Reference number for this position is GZ61191 which is a permanent position based in Johannesburg / Hybrid offering a cost to company salary of R1.3m per annum negotiable on experience and ability. Contact Garth on az.oc.egrem-e@zhtrag or call him on 011 463 3633 to discuss this and other opportunities.
Are you ready for a change of scenery? The E-Merge IT recruitment is a specialist niche recruitment agency. We offer our candidates options so that we can successfully place the right developers with the right companies in the right roles. Check out the e-Merge website www.e-merge.co.za for more great positions.

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Posted on 10 Nov 13:40, Closing date 9 Jan