Lead AI Engineer, MLOps & Cloud Infra – Cape Town

Placements24; Cape Town; Hybrid; ZAR 1,800,000 - 2,400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Performance bonuses

Healthcare coverage

Stock options

Development budget

Forward-thinking culture

Job summary

Placements24 in Cape Town seeks a Lead AI Engineer specializing in MLOps to build and scale production AI systems. You will lead a team of engineers, architect robust pipelines, and ensure reliable deployment, monitoring, and performance across cloud environments.

The role requires deep expertise in ML operations, CI/CD for ML, and strong leadership. A dynamic, high-impact position offering growth and substantial incentives in a fast-paced tech hub in Cape Town.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in CS/Engineering or related field.
• 7+ years of software engineering, with 3+ years in MLOps or AI infrastructure.
• Proven CI/CD pipelines for ML models.
• Strong cloud platform experience and containerization (Docker/Kubernetes).
• Experience with Kubeflow/MLflow/Airflow.
• Excellent leadership, communication, and problem-solving skills.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain scalable MLOps pipelines for training, deployment, and monitoring.
• Lead and mentor MLOps and AI engineers, fostering best practices.
• Develop strategies for model versioning, performance tracking, and A/B testing in production.
• Collaborate with data scientists and software engineers across the ML lifecycle.
• Ensure security, compliance, and performance of AI systems in cloud environments.
• Troubleshoot deployment, performance, and infrastructure issues in production.

Skills

MLOps leadership

CI/CD for ML

Cloud platforms

Team mentoring

ML fundamentals

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in CS/Engineering

Tools

Kubeflow

MLflow

Airflow

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Placements24 in Cape Town seeks a Lead AI Engineer specializing in MLOps to build and scale production AI systems. You will lead a team of engineers, architect robust pipelines, and ensure reliable deployment, monitoring, and performance across cloud environments.

The role requires deep expertise in ML operations, CI/CD for ML, and strong leadership. A dynamic, high-impact position offering growth and substantial incentives in a fast-paced tech hub in Cape Town.