Senior AI Engineer

Durbanville Classifieds; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,500,000; Full time

Job summary

IGrow Wealth Investments Group of Companies seeks a Senior AI Engineer to design and build AI-first applications and agentic systems in Durbanville, Cape Town. You will integrate AI into real business workflows, bridging conventional software engineering with AI engineering and guiding architectural decisions.

You will work across backend, AI systems and data architectures, leveraging LLMs, embeddings and vector databases to create robust, production-grade software with limited supervision.

Qualifications

• Advanced Node.js development in production environments.
• Strong TypeScript skills for backend services.
• Experience in designing scalable APIs and data models.
• Solid PostgreSQL knowledge and query optimization.
• Practical understanding of LLMs and AI application development.
• Familiarity with embeddings, semantic search and vector storage.
• Experience with vector databases or pgvector.
• Knowledge of graph databases and knowledge graphs.
• Understanding of agentic AI and tool calling workflows.
• Experience integrating systems and APIs.
• Comfort with asynchronous processing and event-driven architectures.
• Proficiency with Git and modern software practices.
• Experience using AI coding agents in production development.
• Exposure to AWS, Docker and related tech stacks.
• Familiarity with OAuth/OIDC and IaC.

Responsibilities

• Build production AI applications and agentic systems using Node.js and TypeScript.
• Design backend services, APIs, and event-driven architectures.
• Develop agentic workflows where AI agents use tools and data to complete tasks.
• Work with multiple LLM providers, model selection, and context management.
• Design AI memory and knowledge systems for organisations.
• Work with PostgreSQL schemas, complex queries and production data architecture.
• Implement embeddings, semantic search, and vector retrieval (pgvector / vector DBs).
• Understand graph data and relationships across people, systems, processes and documents.
• Integrate internal and external systems via APIs and MCP interfaces.
• Build durable long-running AI processes with scheduled events and approvals.
• Adopt AI coding agents in development with strong testing and code review.

Skills

Node.js

TypeScript

Backend design

PostgreSQL

Relational data modelling

LLMs

Embeddings

Vector search

Vector databases

Graph databases

Agentic AI

APIs

Asynchronous processing

Git

AI coding agents

AWS

Docker

CI/CD

OAuth/OIDC

Tools

pgvector

Neo4j

AWS

Docker

Job description

Reference: CPT000210-MGK-1

IGrow Wealth Investments Group of Companies, proudly positioned as South Africa’s #1 Investment company, is searching for an ambitious and practical Senior AI Engineerto join our growing team inDurbanville, Cape Town.

This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who is already a strong software engineer and understands how modern AI changes the way applications, workflows and business processes are designed and built.

You will design and build AI-first applications, agents and automated workflows that integrate with real business systems and data.

You will work across backend engineering, AI systems, data architecture and agentic automation, including building systems where AI agents can reason, use tools, access organisational knowledge, execute workflows and collaborate with people.

This is not primarily a data-science or prompt-engineering role. We are looking for a strong engineer who can build production software around modern AI.

You should be able to move between conventional software engineering and AI engineering rather than treating them as separate disciplines, understand the important principle of modern AI development.

"AI is not just a chatbot. It can be an active participant in software systems — finding information, using tools, making decisions within defined boundaries, coordinating workflows and working with humans to achieve outcomes. You will be expected to use AI extensively in your own engineering workflow. We want engineers who understand how to direct coding agents, review what they produce, test it, improve it and remain accountable for the resulting software."\

You should be capable of taking a business requirement, helping shape the architecture, making sound technical decisions and delivering robust production software with limited supervision.

Duties & Responsibilities

Minimum requirements (Advantageous)

• Advanced commercial Node.js experience.
• Advanced TypeScript.
• Strong backend software engineering and API design.
• Strong PostgreSQL knowledge.
• Solid understanding of relational data modelling and database performance.
• Practical understanding of LLMs and modern AI application development.
• Understanding of embeddings, semantic similarity and vector search.
• Experience with or strong understanding of vector databases / pgvector.
• Understanding of graph databases and knowledge graphs.
• Understanding of agentic AI, tool calling and multi-step AI workflows.
• Experience building integrations between different systems and APIs.
• Comfortable with asynchronous processing, queues, scheduled jobs and event-driven architectures.
• Strong Git and modern software-development practices.
• Experience using AI coding agents/coding assistants as part of serious software development, not simply autocomplete.
• AWS, Docker, ECS, S3, Redis, Bedrock, OpenAI, Anthropic, Mastra, MCP, RAG architectures, pgvector, Neo4j or other graph databases.
• OAuth/OIDC, event-driven architectures, workflow engines and infrastructure as code.

Duties and responsibilities include, but not limited to:

• Build production AI applications and agentic systems using Node.js and TypeScript.
• Design backend services, APIs, integrations and event-driven systems.
• Build agentic workflows where AI agents use tools, data and other agents to complete real business tasks.
• Work with LLMs from multiple providers and understand model selection, context management and tool/function calling.
• Design and implement AI memory and organisational knowledge systems.
• Work extensively with PostgreSQL, including schema design, complex queries, performance and production data architecture.
• Implement embeddings, semantic search, RAG and vector retrieval, including PostgreSQL/pgvector and dedicated vector databases where appropriate.
• Understand and work with graph data and graph databases, including relationships between people, systems, processes, documents and organisational knowledge.
• Build integrations with internal and external systems through APIs, MCP servers and other tool interfaces.
• Design reliable long-running AI processes involving scheduled events, human approvals and asynchronous execution.
• Use modern AI coding agents as a core part of the development process while maintaining engineering quality, testing and code review.
• Help establish engineering patterns, reusable components and technical standards for AI-first development.

If you do not receive feedback within two weeks of submitting your application, please consider your application unsuccessful.