Lead AI Engineer - Voice & LLM Production (Hybrid)

E-Merge; South Africa; Hybrid; ZAR 1,260,000 - 1,540,000; Full time

Job summary

E-Merge seeks a Player-coach technical Lead AI Engineer to own delivery of major AI product areas, mentoring the team and driving production quality across voice AI, QA pipelines, and future text channels. You will ship substantial code and set engineering standards while reporting to the Head of AI.

Responsibilities include end-to-end delivery for major areas, partnering on architecture and risk, and leading prompt/agent design, evaluation suites, and observability.

Qualifications

• 7+ years software engineering
• 3+ years shipping LLM and/or speech + LLM systems to production
• Strong production Python
• Deep experience in voice/conversational agents, speech pipelines, 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
• 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

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
• 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

Skills

Python

LLM systems

Leadership

Agile

Tools

Azure

Kubernetes

DevOps

CI/CD

Job description

E-Merge seeks a Player-coach technical Lead AI Engineer to own delivery of major AI product areas, mentoring the team and driving production quality across voice AI, QA pipelines, and future text channels. You will ship substantial code and set engineering standards while reporting to the Head of AI.

Responsibilities include end-to-end delivery for major areas, partnering on architecture and risk, and leading prompt/agent design, evaluation suites, and observability.