Lead AI LLM Engineer

e-Merge IT Recruitment; Sandton; On-site; ZAR 1,350,000 - 1,650,000; Full time

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.

Skills

LLM systems

Python development

Leadership

Azure / Kubernetes

Prompt engineering

Voice / speech tech

Observability & CI/CD

Tools

Azure Functions

Kubernetes

SQL Databases

Blob storage

Job description

Ready to take the lead in building the next generation of AI-powered solutions?

This is an exciting opportunity for a Lead AI Engineer to join a dynamic technology environment where cutting-edge AI is being turned into real-world, production-ready solutions. You’ll work across LLMs, voice agents, speech technologies, automated testing, AI coding tools, and modern software development practices, while taking ownership of key technical initiatives and helping shape the future of conversational AI.
If you’re a hands‑on technical leader who enjoys solving complex engineering challenges, mentoring others, and turning innovative ideas into scalable production systems, this could be the opportunity you’ve been looking for.

Must‑have skills 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

Strong advantages:

• 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
• Design and build production Python services on Azure (Functions and/or Kubernetes workers, messaging, storage, SQL‑backed outcomes)
• 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

Reference number for this position is GZ61522 which is a permanent position based in Sandton offering a salary of R1.5m per annum, negotiable based on experience and ability.