Expert: AI Platform & LLMOps

MoMo from MTN; Johannesburg; On-site; ZAR 1,200,000 - 1,900,000; Full time

Job summary

MTN Group Fintech is building a world-class AI capability to power next-gen financial services across multiple markets. The AI Platform & LLMOps Expert role is hands-on, owning the deployment pipelines, evaluation harness, observability stack and day-to-day production operations of AI models and agents.

You will lead the full-stack platform and APIs that enable user-facing AI capabilities, in a regulated environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in CS/Engineering/IT or related technical field.
• 8–10 years in software/platform/cloud/SRE with 2–3 years leading engineers.
• Hands-on experience building and operating production platforms with CI/CD, environments and observability.
• Experience operating ML workloads in production, including evaluation, monitoring and cost control.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, containers, infrastructure as code and secrets management.
• Experience holding production accountability, including on‑call and incident leadership.
• Experience delivering user-facing applications and APIs alongside platform work.
• Exposure to regulated environments with change control and audit expectations.

Responsibilities

• Own AI platform environments, deployment pipelines and release mechanics.
• Manage model operations: provisioning, routing, versioning, fallbacks and costs.
• Maintain evaluation harness, regression suites and quality gates for pre-release.
• Oversee observability, monitoring, alerting and incident response for AI systems.
• Develop full-stack applications and APIs that consume AI capabilities.

Skills

CI/CD

Observability

Cloud infrastructure

Containers

IaC

Secrets management

On-call incident leadership

Root-cause analysis

Platform engineering

User-facing apps & APIs

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science / Engineering / IT

Tools

Kubernetes

Job description

MTN Group Fintech is building a world-class AI capability from the ground up, creating the platforms, agents, and intelligent systems that will power the next generation of financial services across multiple markets. This is a rare opportunity to join a newly established AI squad at the start of its journey and help define how AI transforms customer experiences, operations, growth, risk management, and productivity across one of Africa's largest fintech ecosystems.

The AI Platform & LLMOps Expert builds and runs the platform on which every Group Fintech agent and AI application is deployed, evaluated, monitored and operated. The role owns the deployment pipeline, the evaluation harness, the observability stack and the day-to-day operation of models and agents in production.

This is a hands‑on engineering role within a build team. The AI Platform & LLMOps Expert builds the platform components, writes the pipelines and tooling, holds production accountability when systems misbehave, and sets the technical direction for the engineers who build the user‑facing applications and interfaces that run on it. The role does not oversee delivery by consultancies or vendors.

As part of your portfolio as Expert: AI Platform & LLMOps, you will be accountable for.:

• The AI platform, its environments, deployment pipelines and release mechanics
• Model operations, including provisioning, routing, versioning, fallback and cost control
• The evaluation harness, regression suites and pre‑release quality gates
• Observability, monitoring, alerting and incident response for AI systems in production
• The full‑stack applications, interfaces and APIs through which users consume AI capability

The role operates within the enterprise AI architecture set by the Enterprise AI Architect, the agent patterns set by the Agentic & MCP Architect, and the security, change and operations standards set by Technology & Platforms, and escalates material deviations.

The incumbent must have the following:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology or a related technical field.
• Minimum of 8 to 10 years in software, platform, cloud or site reliability engineering, including at least 2 to 3 years leading engineers.
• Demonstrated hands‑on build and operation of production platforms, including continuous integration and delivery, environments and observability.
• Practical experience operating large language model or machine learning workloads in production, including evaluation, monitoring and cost control.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, containers, infrastructure as code and secrets management.
• Experience holding production accountability, including on‑call, incident leadership and root‑cause analysis.
• Experience delivering user‑facing applications and APIs alongside platform work.
• Exposure to regulated environments with formal change control and audit expectations.

What will give an edge to your application:

• Recognised cloud, platform or site reliability certification.
• Financial services, fintech or another high‑volume transactional environment.

Ready to make and drive the change with us?

Closing date: 01 October 2026. Late applications will not be accepted.

Should you not hear from us within 2 weeks of closing date, please consider your application unsuccessful