Lead AI LLM Engineer: Production-Grade Conversational AI

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

Job summary

e-Merge IT Recruitment seeks a hands-on Lead AI LLM Engineer to shape and build the next generation of AI-powered and conversational solutions in production. You'll own major AI initiatives, guide architecture, mentor engineers in a small Agile team, and collaborate with the Head of AI on priorities while delivering production-ready services on Azure.

Join a forward-thinking tech environment in Sandton, offering challenging work, scale, and real impact on AI systems across voice agents,

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience.
• 3+ years shipping LLM/speech solutions into production.
• Deep experience in two areas at least: voice agents, speech pipelines, LLM evaluation, multi-agent/tool-calling, prompt design.
• Proven experience leading engineers within a small Agile team.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end delivery across voice agents, speech/LLM QA, post-call intelligence and text-channel agents.
• Partner with Head of AI on architecture, priorities and production risk.
• Design and build production AI services on Azure.
• Lead prompt and agent design.
• Build LLM evaluation and regression frameworks.
• Improve reliability across latency, cost, failures and observability.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews and code reviews.
• Collaborate with platform teams to keep AI products aligned.
• Work with Azure DevOps on deployment and GPU/LLM cost optimisation.

Skills

Software engineering

LLM deployment

Voice agents

Speech pipelines

LLM evaluation

Multi-agent & tool-calling

Prompt design

Team leadership

Tools

Azure

CI/CD

Observability

GPU cost optimisation

Job description

e-Merge IT Recruitment seeks a hands-on Lead AI LLM Engineer to shape and build the next generation of AI-powered and conversational solutions in production. You'll own major AI initiatives, guide architecture, mentor engineers in a small Agile team, and collaborate with the Head of AI on priorities while delivering production-ready services on Azure.

Join a forward-thinking tech environment in Sandton, offering challenging work, scale, and real impact on AI systems across voice agents,