AI Engineer

Platform45; Johannesburg; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,300,000; Full time

Job summary

Platform45 is seeking an AI Engineer to bridge product strategy and hands-on AI work in Rosebank. You’ll define problem spaces, design reusable AI patterns, and orchestrate AI agent teams to deliver production-ready solutions.

Collaborate with engineers, designers, stakeholders, and clients to translate messy real-world problems into clear product direction and scalable AI systems. You’ll prototype, evolve, and ensure responsible, user-centered AI practices.

Qualifications

• Proven experience in AI development.
• 3–6 years in engineering or technical delivery.
• Engineering degree is a major plus.
• Hands-on software development experience.
• Experience with ML pipelines and DL environments.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain agentic AI systems.
• Orchestrate agent teams and coordinate information flows.
• Design reusable solution patterns across problem spaces.
• Write production-quality AI-driven code.
• Prototype quickly and evolve to production.
• Collaborate with engineers and stakeholders to translate problems into AI solutions.

Skills

AI development

Software engineering

Problem solving

Multi-agent systems

Communication

Education

Engineering degree

Tools

LangChain

LangGraph

AutoGen

Agent frameworks

Job description

AI Engineer

Location: On-site (Rosebank)

Employment Type: Full-time

Experience Level: Intermediate-Senior

Department: AI Delivery Team

About the Role

We're looking for an AI Engineer who works at the intersection of product strategy, hands-on engineering, and applied AI - and who understands that most of the value gets created before any code exists.

This role is for someone who doesn't just design solutions on a whiteboard - you define the problem space, hunt for the unlock nobody else has seen, design reusable solutions, and orchestrate AI agent teams to execute at scale. You'll own product outcomes end-to-end while actively building, prototyping, and evolving intelligent systems that solve real business problems.

You'll work closely with engineers, designers, stakeholders, and clients to translate ambiguous, messy, real-world problems into clear product direction and production-ready AI solutions. You won't wait for a well-scoped ticket. You'll walk into ambiguity and create structure through clear thinking and action.

What You’ll Do

Hands-on AI Engineering

• Design, build, and maintain agentic AI systems (multi-step reasoning, tool use, orchestration, memory, autonomy)
• Orchestrate purpose-built agent teams — design how agents coordinate, what information flows where, and how parallel workstreams converge into coherent output
• Design reusable solution patterns — recipes and mapping functions that apply repeatedly within and across problem spaces
• Write clean, production-quality code to implement AI-driven features
• Build prototypes and proof-of-concepts quickly, then harden them for production
• Integrate LLMs, APIs, vector databases, tools, and external systems
• Implement evaluation, monitoring, and iteration strategies for AI systems
• Stay current with emerging AI patterns, frameworks, and best practices — our methods evolve fast, and you'll help shape them

Technical Collaboration

• Work closely with engineers to shape architecture and implementation decisions
• Review code and technical designs with a product-focused mindset
• Balance innovation with maintainability, scalability, and security
• Advocate for responsible, ethical, and user-centred AI usage
• Iterate on plans and ideas in the abstract before dropping into execution — challenge your own framing, stress-test approaches, ask better questions

What We’re Looking For

Core Experience

• Proven experience in AI development
• 3-6 years experience in Engineering or Technical delivery/Software Development
• Engineering degree from any discipline is a major plus — mechanical, civil, electrical, industrial, chemical. Engineering teaches you how to think: systems, first principles, constraints, trade-offs, decomposition. Experience in industries where things get built physically: construction, mining, manufacturing, energy, infrastructure.
• Strong hands-on software development experience - you've built systems that solve real problems, not tutorial projects
  
• Exposure to data engineering and ML pipelines, DL environments, including model development workflows and basic MLOps practices (e.g. training, evaluation, and deployment)
  

Technical Skills

• Strong programming fundamentals (Python or similar preferred, but demonstrated problem-solving in any modern language)
• Experience building with LLMs and agentic frameworks (e.g. LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, custom agent architectures)
• Experience designing workflows involving: Tool calling and orchestration
• Memory and context management
• Multi-agent or multi-step reasoning

• Comfortable with APIs, cloud services, and modern application architectures
• Understanding of software quality, testing, and production readiness
• AI tooling, agentic workflows, and orchestration patterns are a strong plus — but developable if your foundation and drive are right. We coach the specifics.

Product & Thinking Skills

• First-principles problem-solving — you define the real problem, not the surface symptom
• Comfortable working in ambiguity and evolving requirements — that's where the value is, not a reason to wait
• Ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders — in business terms, not jargon
• Outcome-driven mindset — focused on value and impact, not tools and frameworks
• Thinks in reusable patterns — not just solving this problem, but the class of problems it belongs to
• Questions the question before answering it

Nice to Have

• Consulting or client-facing delivery experience
• Has worked across multiple industries or domains — the scenic route is a feature
• Experience with UX research or discovery practices
• Familiarity with compliance, privacy, or responsible AI principles

How You Work

• You define the real problem before jumping to solutions — and you question the question before answering it
• You are biased toward action, experimentation, and learning — fast. You treat decisions as experiments, not commitments
• You're comfortable wearing multiple hats and switching contexts
• You push back on bad ideas — including ours. You challenge assumptions and don't fold when someone says no
• You collaborate deeply but can drive independently when needed
• You care about building useful, well-crafted products that create real value — not impressive-sounding work that goes nowhere
• You're curious, pragmatic, and hungry to learn. You figured things out by doing, not by completing courses

Why Join Us

• Work on meaningful, real-world AI products — not demos
• A high-trust environment with autonomy and ownership
• Exposure to cutting-edge AI work while solving practical business problems
• Collaborative, people-first culture
• Opportunity to shape how we build and deliver AI-powered products
• We’re a software engineering firm becoming an AI company in real time. We need someone who wants to be in the room where that happens.