Principal AI Engineer — Platform & Tooling Leader

DVT; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 1,800,000 - 2,400,000; Full time

Job summary

DVT in Cape Town is seeking a highly accomplished Principal Engineer to drive AI-augmented software development across a large engineering ecosystem. The role is a senior individual contributor, equivalent to Head of Engineering in influence, yet without direct line management.

You will remain hands-on, writing production code, building tooling and setting technical standards across Java, .NET, React and Flutter environments.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Engineering or related field.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience.
• Proven hands-on delivery at senior, staff or principal level.
• Deep production experience in two of Java, .NET, React or Flutter.

Responsibilities

• Design and build platforms supporting AI-assisted software development.
• Develop agentic workflows, retrieval solutions, context layers and evaluation frameworks.
• Integrate AI capabilities into developer tooling and CI/CD pipelines.
• Establish guardrails and engineering standards for AI-generated code.
• Create integration patterns across Java, .NET, React and Flutter environments.
• Build telemetry to measure delivery, quality, defects and productivity.
• Evaluate AI models, platforms, tools and third-party services.
• Lead technical reviews, prototypes and architecture discussions.
• Mentor senior engineers and influence technical direction across teams.
• Ensure solutions meet security, regulatory and data protection requirements.

Skills

Technical leadership

Hands-on coding

Cloud architecture

Mentoring

Cross-team collaboration

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

AWS

CI/CD

Microservices

APIs

Job description

DVT in Cape Town is seeking a highly accomplished Principal Engineer to drive AI-augmented software development across a large engineering ecosystem. The role is a senior individual contributor, equivalent to Head of Engineering in influence, yet without direct line management.

You will remain hands-on, writing production code, building tooling and setting technical standards across Java, .NET, React and Flutter environments.