Principal Java Engineer: AI Augmentation and Engineering Systems

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 is looking for an exceptional 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 technology stacks.

The role will be responsible for designing and implementing the engineering foundations required for safe, measurable and repeatable AI assisted software delivery. This includes agent scaffolding, retrieval and context layers, prompt and workflow libraries, evaluation frameworks, guardrails, developer tooling and engineering telemetry.

Key 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 multiple teams
• Ensure solutions meet security, regulatory and data protection requirements

Technical Requirements

• 10 or more years of software engineering experience
• Proven hands on delivery at senior, staff or principal level
• Deep production experience in at least two of the following:
  • Java, .NET, React, Flutter
• Working knowledge of the remaining technology stacks
• Strong AWS and cloud native architecture experience
• Experience with microservices, event driven systems, APIs and CI/CD
• Experience building internal platforms or developer tooling used across multiple teams

AI Engineering Requirements

• Practical experience building and shipping AI enabled engineering solutions
• Large language model application patterns
• Agentic workflows and tool use
• Retrieval augmented generation and context engineering
• Prompt and workflow design
• Model evaluation and benchmarking
• Evaluation harnesses, regression testing and guardrails
• Understanding of generative AI security, safety and production failure modes
• Advisory or strategy experience without practical implementation will not be sufficient.

Leadership Requirements

• Proven technical leadership across multiple teams
• Ability to influence without direct authority
• Strong mentoring and engineering enablement skills
• Ability to communicate technical decisions to technical and business stakeholders
• Confidence to defend technical decisions under commercial pressure

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Engineering or a related field.

Ideal Candidate Profile

The ideal candidate is a deeply technical Principal Engineer who combines strong software engineering fundamentals with practical AI engineering experience.

You should be comfortable writing production code, building platforms for other engineers, working across different technology stacks and influencing technical direction at organisational level.

You will be expected to solve problems where no established implementation pattern exists and where decisions carry significant operational, security and regulatory consequences.

This role is best suited to someone who wants broad technical influence while continuing to build, prototype, test and ship working software.

** Principal Engineer role is positioned as a senior individual contributor at Head of Engineering equivalence.

The role carries no headcount, budget authority or line management responsibility.

Its seniority derives from its technical influence across the engineering environment and its accountability for delivering the technical foundation of the organisation’s transformation.