Expert: Enterprise AI Architect

MoMo from MTN; Johannesburg; On-site; ZAR 1,200,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Job summary

MTN Group Fintech in Johannesburg is building a world-class AI capability and is seeking an Expert: Enterprise AI Architect to define enterprise AI architecture, data foundations and interoperability standards for production AI across the group. The role requires hands-on design and prototyping, and drives architecture decisions that govern what engineers build in production.

The incumbent will act as the design authority for AI across Group Fintech, ensuring architectural integrity, reviewing

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 Enterprise AI Architect is the design authority for artificial intelligence across Group Fintech. The role defines the enterprise AI architecture, the model and solution patterns, the data and knowledge foundations, and the interoperability standards on which every agent and AI application built by the capability depends.

This is a hands-on architecture role within a build team. The Enterprise AI Architect designs and prototypes the reference implementations, writes the standards, reviews the code and designs produced by engineers, and remains close enough to the build to be accountable for whether the architecture actually works in production. The role does not direct delivery by consultancies or vendors.

As part of your portfolio as Expert: Enterprise AI Architect, you will be accountable for.:

• The enterprise AI reference architecture and target state
• Model selection standards, solution patterns and architectural decision records
• Data, knowledge and retrieval architecture, including the ingestion and embedding estate
• Interoperability between AI components, core platforms, data sources and enterprise systems
• Architectural assurance of everything the capability puts into production

Architecture decisions taken in this role set the technical direction for the whole AI capability and constrain what every other engineer builds. The role works within the enterprise architecture, security and data governance frameworks set by Technology & Platforms, and escalates material deviations or new patterns for governance approval.

The role is deployed into business-owned delivery squads as the architecture requires. The squad lead owns the business outcome; this role owns the technical integrity of what is built.

The incumbent must have the following:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, Mathematics or a related technical field.
• Minimum of 8 to 10 years in software, data or machine learning engineering, including at least 3 years in an architecture or technical design authority role.
• Demonstrated hands-on design and build of AI or machine learning systems running in production.
• Practical depth in large language models, retrieval augmented generation, embeddings, vector and knowledge stores, and context engineering.
• Experience designing data and integration architecture across heterogeneous enterprise systems.
• Experience defining and enforcing engineering standards consumed by multiple teams.
• Exposure to regulated environments and to security, privacy and model risk review.

What will give an edge to your application:

• Recognised architecture or cloud certification.
• Financial services, fintech or another high-volume transactional environment.

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