Azure AI Development Lead - RAG, MLOps & Deployment

ATS Client; Johannesburg; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,500,000; Full time

Job summary

ATS Client is seeking an AI Development Specialist in Johannesburg to lead the design, development, and deployment of scalable AI solutions on Microsoft Azure. You will own end-to-end delivery—from data ingestion and model development to deployment and operationalization—while ensuring security, reliability, and enterprise compliance.

You will build RAG pipelines, optimize prompt strategies, and drive MLOps practices, governance, and observability across production AI systems.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in software or ML engineering with Azure delivery experience.
• Proven production AI deployments on Azure with architecture docs.
• Strong skills in RAG design, prompt engineering, and tuning.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop and deploy end-to-end AI solutions on Azure.
• Build and optimize RAG pipelines and prompt strategies.
• Translate requirements into scalable AI architectures and designs.
• Implement event-driven data integrations using Azure services.
• Containerize apps and manage deployments on AKS, Functions, App Service.
• Develop CI/CD pipelines for automated testing and releases.
• Apply IaC for repeatable deployments and governance.
• Establish MLOps with model versioning, monitoring and lifecycle management.
• Add logging, telemetry, and observability for production systems.
• Optimize model performance, scalability and cost efficiency.
• Ensure security, data governance and Responsible AI alignment.
• Troubleshoot production issues across AI and data pipelines.
• Collaborate with data, engineering, and business teams and document runbooks.
• Stay updated with AI and Azure tech and push improvements.

Skills

RAG system design

Prompt engineering

Performance tuning

Data engineering

Secure integration patterns

Responsible AI frameworks

Tools

Azure

AKS

CI/CD

MLOps

Job description

ATS Client is seeking an AI Development Specialist in Johannesburg to lead the design, development, and deployment of scalable AI solutions on Microsoft Azure. You will own end-to-end delivery—from data ingestion and model development to deployment and operationalization—while ensuring security, reliability, and enterprise compliance.

You will build RAG pipelines, optimize prompt strategies, and drive MLOps practices, governance, and observability across production AI systems.