Ai Platform Engineers (Ai/Genai | Cloud | Kubernetes) - Contract - Onsite - Sandton

Datafin It Recruitment; Johannesburg; On-site; ZAR 1,200,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Job summary

Datafin It Recruitment is seeking senior AI Platform Engineers to design, build, operate and optimise enterprise-grade AI infrastructure within a regulated environment. You will handle AI gateways, model serving, vector databases and GPU workloads across multi-clouds.

Role requires hands-on experience with platform engineering, IaC tooling, cost governance, security controls and observability to support production AI workloads.

Qualifications

• Postgraduate qualification in Computer Science or related field.
• Master’s degree preferred for senior roles.
• Certifications like AWS/Azure/HashiCorp favored.

Responsibilities

• Design and deploy scalable multi-cloud AI platform infrastructure.
• Build reusable components for AI gateways, model serving, and vector DBs.
• Develop infrastructure-as-code using Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation or equivalent.

Skills

Multi-cloud platforms

Kubernetes

Terraform / IaC

CI/CD

Model serving

Security & IAM

Observability

Cost governance

Education

Postgraduate degree in CS/IT/Math

Master’s preferred

Certifications (AWS/Azure/HashiCorp)

Tools

AWS Bedrock/SageMaker

Azure AI Foundry/Azure OpenAI

Databricks AI

Job description

ENVIRONMENT:

Our client is seeking highly specialised AI Platform Engineers to design, build, operate and optimise enterprise-grade AI infrastructure within a complex, regulated environment. This is not a general cloud engineering, IT infrastructure or data science role. The successful candidates must have hands-on experience supporting production AI workloads across multi-cloud environments and must be comfortable working across AI infrastructure, model serving, agentic AI, security, observability, infrastructure-as-code and AI cost governance.

DUTIES:

• Design, deploy and optimise scalable multi-cloud AI platform infrastructure.
• Build reusable platform components for AI gateways, model serving, vector databases, data pipelines and GPU workloads.
• Develop and maintain infrastructure-as-code using Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation or equivalent technologies.
• Design infrastructure supporting agentic AI, including orchestration environments, tool-calling, agent memory, state management and multi-agent communication.
• Implement cloud-agnostic model-serving patterns that support workload portability.
• Define and manage AI platform SLAs covering availability, inference latency, throughput and reliability.
• Implement platform observability, monitoring, incident management, release management and operational runbooks.
• Design and implement zero-trust security controls for AI platforms.
• Manage AI compute expenditure through cost attribution, chargeback/showback, workload optimisation and usage reporting.
• Maintain technical documentation, architectural decision records and governance evidence.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to platform engineering standards and delivery practices.

REQUIREMENTS:

• Senior level: approximately 5–8 years of relevant cloud and AI platform engineering experience.
• Lead/Principal level: approximately 8–12 years of relevant experience, including technical leadership and responsibility for engineering teams or platform squads.

Mandatory Technical Experience:

• Candidates must demonstrate meaningful production experience in most of the following:
• At least two of the following:
  • AWS Bedrock or SageMaker
  • Microsoft Azure AI Foundry or Azure OpenAI
  • Databricks AI
  • Enterprise Hugging Face deployments
• Kubernetes, Docker, Helm and containerised platform services.
• Terraform, Pulumi, AWS CDK, CloudFormation or equivalent infrastructure-as-code.
• CI/CD and automated deployment of cloud or AI platform components.
• Production model-serving infrastructure, AI gateways or inference endpoints.
• Platform observability using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry or Databricks Lakehouse Monitoring.
• Cloud security, identity and access management, including OAuth/OIDC, JWT, RBAC or ABAC.
• Production incident management, SLAs, release management and operational readiness.
• Experience within banking, financial services or another highly regulated enterprise environment.

Specialist AI Experience:

• Candidates should demonstrate practical experience in one or more of the following:
• Agent orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph, AutoGen, AWS Bedrock Agents or Microsoft Foundry Agent Service.
• Model Context Protocol, tool-calling APIs and agent state or memory management.
• Retrieval-augmented generation and vector database infrastructure.
• Cloud‑agnostic model serving using tools such as ONNX, BentoML, Triton Inference Server or vLLM.
• MLOps platforms such as MLflow, Kubeflow or Airflow.
• GPU cluster management and inference or training workload optimisation.
• Prompt-injection prevention, output filtering, data‑exfiltration controls and AI threat modelling.

AI Finops Experience:

• Candidates should have experience with some combination of:
• AI or cloud cost attribution and tagging.
• Chargeback and showback models.
• Token, GPU, DBU or provisioned-throughput cost management.
• Rightsizing, workload scheduling and reserved or spot-instance optimisation.
• Cost dashboards, anomaly detection and cost-per-use-case reporting.
• Communicating technical cost trade-offs to senior technology, business or finance stakeholders.

Qualifications:

• Postgraduate qualification in Computer Science, Information Technology, Data Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Engineering or a related quantitative field.
• A Master’s degree is preferred and may be required for certain senior appointments.
• Relevant certifications are strongly preferred, including:
  • AWS Solutions Architect Professional or AWS Machine Learning
  • Microsoft Azure AI Engineer
  • FinOps Certified Practitioner
  • Certified Cloud Security Professional or equivalent
  • HashiCorp Terraform Associate
  • Kubernetes certification