Lead AI LLM Engineer: Build Production-Conversational AI

E-Merge; Sandton; On-site; ZAR 1,350,000 - 1,650,000; Full time

Job summary

E-Merge in Sandton seeks a Lead AI Engineer to drive production AI solutions using LLMs, speech tech, and modern software practices. You’ll own key technical initiatives, mentor engineers, and ship scalable systems in a hands-on leadership role.

You will work across Azure-based services, voice agents, and post‑call intelligence, shaping the future of conversational AI while balancing performance, cost, and reliability in a dynamic tech environment.

Qualifications

• 7+ years software engineering with 3+ years shipping LLM/LLM-based systems to production.
• Strong production Python experience.
• Experience in two of: voice agents, speech pipelines, LLM evaluation, multi-agent/tool-calling systems.
• Azure experience (serverless/Kubernetes, queues, blob storage, SQL, secrets).
• Prompt engineering for multi-step, compliance-sensitive workflows.
• Proven player-coach leadership in a small agile team.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end delivery for major AI 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 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.

Skills

LLM systems

Python

Voice agents

Prompt engineering

Leadership

Agile team lead

Tools

Azure

Job description

E-Merge in Sandton seeks a Lead AI Engineer to drive production AI solutions using LLMs, speech tech, and modern software practices. You’ll own key technical initiatives, mentor engineers, and ship scalable systems in a hands-on leadership role.

You will work across Azure-based services, voice agents, and post‑call intelligence, shaping the future of conversational AI while balancing performance, cost, and reliability in a dynamic tech environment.