Data Scientist / Ml Engineer Cape Town, Sa / Remote

Clairo; Gauteng; Hybrid; ZAR 400 000 - 500 000; Full time

Job summary

A London-based AI firm is looking for a Data Scientist / ML Engineer to enhance their AI agent capabilities. Responsibilities include developing and optimizing AI components, experimenting with innovative AI techniques, and deploying models on a Kubernetes infrastructure. The role offers a competitive salary with share options, hybrid work flexibility, and opportunities to work with UK clients. Join the team to be part of redefining AI for business with a focus on privacy and performance.

Benefits

Competitive salary with share options

Unlimited leave

Hybrid working opportunities

Networking with UK entrepreneurs

Cape Town team culture fund

Qualifications

• Experience in software engineering with version control.
• Familiarity with Natural Language Processing concepts.
• Ability to build modular AI systems and deploy in K8s.

Responsibilities

• Develop and optimize AI agent components.
• Experiment and evaluate new AI techniques.
• Deploy AI models into Clairo's Kubernetes stack.

Skills

Software engineering skills

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

AI agent architectures

Problem-solving skills

Machine learning paradigms

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Hugging Face

Job description

Location: Cape Town, SA / Remote

Employment Type: Full-time

Salary: Competitive + Share Options

Reporting To: Lead Data Scientist

Clairo AI

Clairo AI is a London‑based AI agent platform focused on fully private AI. Our platform enables businesses to deploy AI agents that connect to their internal data sources while ensuring complete privacy—without relying on external APIs. We operate on bare‑metal infrastructure and have developed a Kubernetes platform to deploy our AI models, microservices, and enterprise applications at scale.

Our AI stack is designed to solve complex business challenges across data search, automation, and AI‑powered decision‑making. Following a successful funding round, we are expanding our engineering and data science teams, hiring four to five new team members.

At Clairo AI, we embed Responsible AI into everything we do:

• Privacy: We prioritise data security and client confidentiality.
• Sustainability: Our Icelandic data centre enables us to run AI infrastructure with net‑zero emissions.
• Trust: We ensure AI reliability through trust metrics, citations, and better prompting.
• Education: We actively educate businesses on how to use AI effectively and responsibly.

Join us in redefining AI for business—private, secure, and high‑performance.

Job Summary

We are looking for a Data Scientist / ML Engineer to enhance the agentic capabilities of Clairo AI. This role involves building out Clairo's AI agent framework under the Lead Data Scientist, who is spearheading our AI vision. Your primary responsibility will be building, experimenting, and testing AI agent components to determine their effectiveness in various applications. These components will be deployed within Clairo's Kubernetes stack for both customer solutions and Clairo's SaaS platform. If you are passionate about building AI‑powered agentic systems, experimenting with cutting‑edge agent SDKs, and deploying scalable AI models, this role will provide deep technical challenges and real‑world impact.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and optimise AI agentic components within Clairo's AI platform.
• Generate hypotheses, experiment, and test new AI techniques to evaluate their effectiveness in real‑world applications.
• Contribute to and maintain the Agent code framework.
• Be a gatekeeper for code quality and design philosophy.
• Deploy AI models and components into Clairo's Kubernetes stack, ensuring scalability and reliability.
• Work closely with the data science and engineering teams to drive innovation in Clairo's AI agent framework.
• Contribute to MLOps best practices, ensuring efficient AI model lifecycle management.

Requirements & Qualifications

• Strong grasp of general software engineering skills: version control, code orchestration, design patterns, Linux terminals, virtualisation technologies (Docker & K8s).
• Familiarity with Natural Language Processing (NLP) concepts: tokens, vectorisation, embeddings, semantic vs. syntactic meanings.
• Familiarity with LangChain or other agent SDKs / frameworks.
• Understanding of AI agent architectures and how to build modular AI systems.
• Strong problem‑solving skills and ability to work in an experimental, research‑driven environment.
• Strong grasp of traditional machine learning model paradigms and concepts: supervised vs. unsupervised, tree models, optimisation, etc.
• Understanding of retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), vector databases, and knowledge retrieval systems.

Preferred

• Experience with Hugging Face and fine‑tuning LLMs.
• Experience with Crew AI (big plus).
• Ability to deploy AI models into Kubernetes‑based infrastructure.
• Experience with Knowledge Graphs.
• Background in multi‑agent AI architectures.
• Familiarity with private AI infrastructure and security best practices.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary with share options.
• Opportunity to relocate to the UK—after one year, Clairo AI will discuss visa sponsorship for candidates who wish to move to the UK.
• Unlimited leave—take time off whenever you need it.
• Hybrid and flexible working—work when and where you want, as long as the work gets done.
• Client project opportunities—work directly with UK businesses, designing AI agents to solve complex challenges.
• Networking with top UK entrepreneurs—Clairo AI is closely connected to leading business figures, providing strong career‑building opportunities.
• Cape Town team culture fund—sponsored beer money for social gatherings with the Cape Town‑based team.
• Future office space in Innovation City, Cape Town—A growing tech hub set to become Africa's equivalent of Silicon Valley.

Apply Now