Principal AI Deployment Architect — Remote

Scrums; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 1,200,000 - 1,900,000; Full time

Job summary

Scrums is seeking a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer in Cape Town to lead complex enterprise AI deployments across executive advisory, product strategy and hands-on engineering. You will shape deployment paths, design architecture, and mentor senior engineers while coordinating with customers, engineers and partners.

You will guide AI agent harness improvements, oversee governance, security and cost considerations, and align platform capabilities with business outcomes across global clients.

Responsibilities

• Lead executive and technical discovery for complex enterprise programmes, identifying where applied AI can create measurable operational value.
• Define the target architecture, deployment strategy, governance model and technical success measures for multi-team AI programmes.
• Design and, where necessary, build the highest-risk components across agents, models, data, integrations, infrastructure and security.
• Set standards for context, tool authority, permissions, evaluations, guardrails and observability within the Scrums.com AI agent harness.
• Use the Scrums.com Software Engineering Orchestration Platform to coordinate delivery across customer teams, Scrums.com engineers, AI agents and technology partners.
• Guide model and vendor selection while preserving customer control over data, infrastructure, performance and cost.
• Review architectures, unblock critical incidents and make decisions where reliability, security or regulated-industry requirements are material.
• Develop reusable deployment patterns, reference architectures and engineering practices that improve outcomes across customers.
• Mentor senior engineers and act as a trusted technical counterpart to CTOs, CIOs and heads of engineering.
• Partner with Scrums.com product leaders to turn field insight into platform and AI agent harness improvements.

Job description

Scrums is seeking a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer in Cape Town to lead complex enterprise AI deployments across executive advisory, product strategy and hands-on engineering. You will shape deployment paths, design architecture, and mentor senior engineers while coordinating with customers, engineers and partners.

You will guide AI agent harness improvements, oversee governance, security and cost considerations, and align platform capabilities with business outcomes across global clients.