Lead Production AI LLM Engineer (Voice & Agents)

e-Merge IT Recruitment; Sandton; On-site; ZAR 1,400,000 - 1,700,000; Full time

Job summary

e-Merge IT Recruitment is seeking a Lead AI LLM Engineer in Sandton, South Africa. The role is hands-on leadership, turning ambitious AI ideas into scalable, production-grade systems across voice agents, speech pipelines and multi-agent tooling.

You will mentor engineers, shape architecture with the Head of AI, and drive reliable, cost-efficient AI services on Azure while delivering production-ready QA and post-call intelligence solutions.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience.
• 3+ years shipping LLM and/or speech + LLM solutions into production.
• Deep experience in two of: voice/conversational agents; speech pipelines (STT, diarisation, VAD); LLM evaluation; multi-agent & tool-calling; prompt design for multi-step workflows; leading engineers in 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.

Skills

7+ years software

3+ years LLM

LLM production

Voice/Conversations

Prompt design

Agile leadership

Job description

e-Merge IT Recruitment is seeking a Lead AI LLM Engineer in Sandton, South Africa. The role is hands-on leadership, turning ambitious AI ideas into scalable, production-grade systems across voice agents, speech pipelines and multi-agent tooling.

You will mentor engineers, shape architecture with the Head of AI, and drive reliable, cost-efficient AI services on Azure while delivering production-ready QA and post-call intelligence solutions.