Principal AI Software Engineer & Platform Lead

dvtcareers; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 1,400,000 - 2,100,000; Full time

Job summary

DVT is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the technical implementation of AI augmented software engineering across a large and complex engineering environment. This is a senior individual contributor position, equivalent in influence to a Head of Engineering, but without direct line management responsibility.

The successful candidate will remain deeply hands on, writing production code, building engineering tooling and setting technical standards across multiple development teams and

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience with senior-level delivery.
• Deep production experience in two or more of Java, .NET, React, 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

AI engineering

Software architecture

Cloud architecture

Java

.NET

React

Flutter

CI/CD

Mentoring

Security

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s in CS/SE

Tools

AWS

CI/CD

Job description

DVT is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the technical implementation of AI augmented software engineering across a large and complex engineering environment. This is a senior individual contributor position, equivalent in influence to a Head of Engineering, but without direct line management responsibility.

The successful candidate will remain deeply hands on, writing production code, building engineering tooling and setting technical standards across multiple development teams and