Principle Engineer | AI Augmentation & Engineering Systems

Communicate Finance; Wes-Kaap; On-site; ZAR 1,200,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Job summary

Communicate Finance seeks a Principal Engineer to build the AI engineering foundations enabling AI-assisted software delivery across multiple teams. You will design and deploy platforms, tooling, standards, and guardrails to help engineers work more effectively with AI.

You’ll influence a 150-person engineering function while remaining a hands-on technical contributor, mentoring senior engineers and driving architectural direction.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in CS/SE or related field.
• 10+ years of hands-on software engineering experience.
• Production experience in two or more listed technologies.
• Experience with AWS, microservices, APIs and CI/CD practices.
• Experience building developer platforms and internal tooling.
• Ability to influence senior stakeholders without line authority.
• Exposure to regulated, high-availability environments is beneficial.

Responsibilities

• Design and build AI engineering platforms, tooling, and guardrails.
• Drive AI adoption across engineering teams with reference implementations.
• Create context, retrieval, and knowledge systems to boost productivity.
• Define technical standards and best practices for AI software development.
• Build telemetry and measurement systems for engineering insights.
• Evaluate emerging AI platforms and technologies.
• Mentor senior engineers and influence technical direction across teams.
• Prototype innovative solutions and reduce technical risk.

Skills

10+ years of software engineering

Education

Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science / Software Engineering / related field

Tools

Java

NET

React

Flutter

AWS

Microservices

API design

CI/CD

Job description

Job Description

As Principal Engineer, you'll be responsible for building the technical foundations that enable AI-assisted software delivery across multiple engineering teams and technology stacks. You'll design, build, and deploy the platforms, tooling, frameworks, standards, and guardrails that allow engineers to work more effectively with AI.

Key responsibilities include

• Designing and building AI engineering platforms, harnesses, evaluation frameworks, and developer tooling
• Driving AI adoption across engineering teams through reference implementations and technical enablement
• Creating context, retrieval, and knowledge systems that improve engineering productivity and quality
• Defining technical standards and best practices for AI-assisted software development
• Building telemetry and measurement systems that provide engineering insights at an organisational level
• Evaluating emerging AI platforms, models, and engineering technologies
• Mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction across multiple teams without formal authority
• Prototyping innovative solutions and reducing technical risk before large-scale implementation

You’ll influence an engineering function of approximately 150 people across engineering, product, delivery, and support while remaining a hands‑on technical contributor.

Skills & Experience

• Minimum 10+ years' of software engineering experience with a strong track record of hands‑on technical delivery

Deep production experience in at least two of the following technologies:

• Java
• NET
• React
• Flutter

Strong experience with

• AWS and cloud-native architectures
• Microservices
• Event-driven systems
• API design
• CI/CD engineering
• Practical experience building and deploying AI-powered engineering solutions.

Expertise in

• LLM applications
• Agentic workflows
• Retrieval and context engineering
• Prompt engineering
• AI evaluation and benchmarking
• AI safety and governance practices
• Experience building developer platforms and internal tooling
• Ability to influence senior stakeholders and engineering teams without line authority
• Exposure to regulated, high-availability, consumer-facing environments would be advantageous

Qualification

• Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Engineering, or a related field