Remote Principal AI Engineer: Cloud Infra & MLOps Leader

Placements24; Pretoria; Hybrid; ZAR 2,953,000 - 4,266,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

Retirement plan

Professional development budget

Home office stipend

Performance bonuses

Job summary

Placements24 seeks a highly experienced Remote Principal AI Engineer to architect, build, and scale cloud AI infrastructure. You will lead MLOps pipelines, distributed training, and cross‑functional collaboration with researchers to support cutting‑edge AI work.

You will mentor engineers, drive best practices, and stay ahead of cloud AI trends in a remote‑first environment, enabling high performance and low latency across global teams.

Qualifications

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of software engineering, with at least 5 years in large-scale cloud infrastructure for AI/ML.
• Deep expertise in AWS, Azure, or GCP and related services for compute, storage, networking, and ML.
• Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Strong experience with containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI, etc.).
• Solid understanding of ML workflows and MLOps principles.
• Excellent programming skills in Python, Go, or Java.
• Proven ability to lead technical initiatives and mentor engineers remotely.

Responsibilities

• Architect scalable, cost-effective cloud infra for AI/ML workloads across major cloud providers.
• Design and build robust MLOps pipelines for training, deployment, monitoring, and management.
• Develop distributed training frameworks and infrastructure to accelerate large-scale AI models.
• Optimize AI model performance and resource utilization in cloud environments.
• Lead the technical direction for AI infrastructure and set engineering standards.
• Collaborate with researchers and data scientists to meet infrastructure needs.
• Triage complex infra issues to ensure high availability and low latency.
• Mentor junior engineers and promote technical excellence in a remote setting.
• Stay current with emerging cloud technologies and AI infra trends.

Skills

Python

Go

Java

Terraform

Kubernetes

Docker

CI/CD

ML workflows

Problem solving

Education

Master's or PhD in CS/Engineering

Tools

Terraform

CloudFormation

Jenkins

GitLab CI

Job description

Placements24 seeks a highly experienced Remote Principal AI Engineer to architect, build, and scale cloud AI infrastructure. You will lead MLOps pipelines, distributed training, and cross‑functional collaboration with researchers to support cutting‑edge AI work.

You will mentor engineers, drive best practices, and stay ahead of cloud AI trends in a remote‑first environment, enabling high performance and low latency across global teams.