Senior AI-Driven Backend Engineer (Remote)

A Bit About You; Cape Town; Hybrid; ZAR 900,000 - 1,300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical Aid contribution

Pension fund contribution

Quarterly performance incentive bonus

Risk benefit company contributions

Reimbursable communications allowance

Half‑day off on your birthday

5 personal days leave a year, over and

Flexible working conditions (remote &

Home office set‑up with laptop

Job summary

Clickatell, founded in Cape Town, seeks a backend engineer who uses AI to accelerate development and build scalable, reliable systems. You will own backend services end‑to‑end, standing up production‑grade systems with a focus on speed and correctness, and you will ensure robust integration of AI features into workflows.

You will work with Java, Spring Boot, and Python, leveraging AWS and containerized deployments, while maintaining high standards of code quality and reliability.

Qualifications

• Strong experience with Java (Spring Boot) and Python backend systems.
• Experience building high-scale, low-latency distributed systems.
• Solid understanding of APIs, databases, caching, and event-driven systems (e.g., Kafka).
• Experience with cloud environments (AWS) and containerized deployments.
• Familiarity with LLM APIs, token usage, latency, and response handling.

Responsibilities

• Build and own backend services using Java, Spring Boot, and Python—designed for scale, reliability, and real‑time use.
• Use AI tools (Amazon Q, Cursor, Copilot, Claude, GPT) to accelerate development, refactoring, and problem‑solving.
• Turn product ideas into production‑ready systems quickly, without compromising quality.
• Integrate AI capabilities (LLMs, RAG, vector search) into backend workflows where they add real value.
• Act as the final filter for AI‑generated code—identify flaws, inefficiencies, and incorrect assumptions before they ship.
• Design clean APIs, handle distributed system challenges, and ensure performance at scale.
• Write and validate tests to keep fast‑moving systems stable.
• Debug production issues and take full ownership of reliability and performance.

Skills

Java Spring Boot

Python

Distributed systems

APIs

Databases

Caching

Kafka

AWS

LLM APIs

Job description

Clickatell, founded in Cape Town, seeks a backend engineer who uses AI to accelerate development and build scalable, reliable systems. You will own backend services end‑to‑end, standing up production‑grade systems with a focus on speed and correctness, and you will ensure robust integration of AI features into workflows.

You will work with Java, Spring Boot, and Python, leveraging AWS and containerized deployments, while maintaining high standards of code quality and reliability.