Lead AI Engineer: LLM & Voice Systems (Production)

e-Merge IT Recruitment

Sandton

On-site

ZAR 1,350,000 - 1,650,000

Full time

14 days+

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Job summary

e-Merge IT Recruitment in Sandton is seeking a Lead AI Engineer to drive AI-powered solutions in production. You will work across LLMs, voice agents, speech pipelines, and modern software practices, owning key technical initiatives and mentoring a small agile team.

You are a hands-on technical leader skilled in Python, Azure, and prompt engineering, with proven leadership in delivering scalable AI systems. This permanent role is based in Sandton with a competitive salary.

Qualifications

7+ years software engineering experience.
3+ years shipping LLM and/or speech+LLM systems to production.
Strong production Python and Azure experience.

Responsibilities

Own end-to-end delivery for one or more major areas (voice agents, speech/LLM pipelines, post-call intelligence).
Partner with the head of AI on architecture, priorities and production risk.
Design and build production Python services on Azure (Functions and/or Kubernetes workers, messaging, storage).
Lead prompt/agent design, structured outputs, evaluation suites and reliability.
Drive post-call intelligence quality: scoring accuracy and pipeline performance.
Mentor senior to junior engineers through reviews and pairing.
Collaborate with the platform portal team to keep dashboards and QA surfaces aligned.
Work with Azure DevOps on deployability, GPU/LLM cost trade-offs, and production ops.