Lead AI Engineer

e-Merge IT Recruitment; Sandton; Hybrid; ZAR 1,260,000 - 1,540,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work arrangement

Salary up to R1.4 million per year

Job summary

e-Merge IT Recruitment seeks a Player-coach technical Lead AI Engineer to own delivery of major AI product areas, reporting to the head of AI. Ships substantial code, sets engineering standards, mentors the team, and drives production quality across voice AI, automated QA, and future text channels.

The reference role is permanent, Hybrid in Sandton, Johannesburg, with a salary up to R1.4mil per annum negotiable based on experience.

Qualifications

• 7+ years software engineering with 3+ years shipping LLM/speech systems to production.
• Strong production Python experience and Azure-based architecture.
• Experience with prompt design, multi-step workflows, and compliant systems.
• Proven player-coach leadership in a small agile team.
• Experience with AI coding assistants such as Cursor/Claude.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end delivery for major AI product areas (voice agents, QA pipelines, or text channels).
• Partner with Head of AI on architecture, priorities, and production risk.
• Lead prompt/agent design, evaluation suites, and operational reliability.
• Drive post-call intelligence quality, scoring accuracy, and pipeline performance.
• Mentor senior to junior engineers through design reviews and code reviews.
• Collaborate with platform teams to align campaigns and QA surfaces with AI runtime.
• Work with Azure DevOps on deployability and production operations.
• Use AI coding tools to raise team speed and quality.

Skills

Python

LLM systems

Azure

Leadership

Prompt engineering

CI/CD

Observability

Tools

Cursor

Claude

Azure DevOps

Kubernetes

Job description

Our client is looking for a Player-coach technical Lead AI Engineer who owns delivery of major AI product areas, reporting to the head of AI. Ships substantial code, sets engineering standards, mentors the team, and drives production quality across voice AI, automated call QA, and future text channels.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end delivery for one or more major areas (voice agents, speech/LLM QA pipelines, post-call intelligence, or text-channel agents)
• Partner with the Head of AI on architecture, priorities, and production risk; turn decisions into shipped systems
• Lead prompt/agent design, structured LLM outputs, evaluation/regression suites, and operational reliability (latency, cost, failure handling, observability)
• Drive post-call intelligence quality: scoring accuracy, structured output reliability, and pipeline performance
• Mentor senior → Junior engineers through design reviews, pairing, and code review
• Collaborate with the platform portal team so campaigns, dashboards, and QA surfaces stay aligned with the AI runtime
• Work with Azure DevOps on deployability, GPU/LLM cost trade-offs, and production operations
• Use and champion AI coding tools (e.g. Cursor, Claude) to raise team speed and quality

Qualifications and experience

• 7+ years software engineering; 3+ years shipping LLM and/or speech + LLM systems to production
• Strong production Python
• Deep experience in at least two of: voice/conversational agents, speech pipelines (STT/diarization/VAD), LLM evaluation, multi-agent/tool-calling systems
• Solid Azure experience (serverless and/or Kubernetes, queues/messaging, blob storage, SQL, secrets/identity)
• Prompt engineering for multi-step, compliance-sensitive workflows
• Proven player-coach leadership in a small agile team
• Experience with AI coding assistants such as Cursor, Claude, or similar
• Experience with AI coding assistants such as Cursor, Claude, or similar
• Voice platform experience and STT/TTS vendor tuning
• Whisper / diarization / vLLM / OpenAI Batch / structured outputs
• Contact-centre, collections, or BPO domain experience
• Observability (Application Insights, Grafana) and CI/CD collaboration
• WhatsApp / email bot experience

The reference number for this position is NG61522 which is a p ermanent, Hybrid role in Sandton, Johannesburg offering a salary of up to R1.4mil per annum salary negotiable based on experience.