SENIOR AI ENGINEER

Liquid Thought; Johannesburg; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,500,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical aid

Retirement contributions

Professional development

Cutting-edge AI infrastructure

Career growth

Job summary

Liquid Thought is seeking a Senior AI Engineer to scale AI across a leading media-tech portfolio in South Africa. You will implement production-ready AI systems for personalisation, newsroom automation and content workflows, collaborating with product managers, data scientists and engineers to deliver impactful solutions.

The role emphasizes NLP, content recommendation, and real-time processing with cloud-based deployments, MLOps practices and scalable architectures.

Qualifications

• Honours or Masters in CS, ML, data science or a related field.
• 5+ years software engineering with at least 3 years in AI/ML.
• Strong Python and ML framework experience (TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn).
• Hands-on cloud and containerisation skills; production ML at scale.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and deploy scalable AI/ML systems for content personalisation and newsroom tools.
• Implement MLOps, model versioning, monitoring and automated retraining.
• Collaborate with product teams, data scientists and editors to deliver AI solutions.
• Develop APIs, microservices, and real-time content processing pipelines.

Skills

Python

ML frameworks

Cloud platforms

Docker/Kubernetes

API/microservices

MLOps

NLP

Vector embeddings

Education

Honours/Masters in CS/ML/Data Science

Tools

AWS SageMaker

Google AI Platform

Azure ML

Job description

Location: Cape Town or Johannesburg, South Africa

Our client is South Africa's leading media and technology company, reaching millions of people daily across a diverse portfolio of digital platforms, news brands and content channels. They're at the forefront of digital transformation in the media industry, leveraging cutting-edge AI and machine learning technologies to personalise experiences and accelerate content creation across all their brands.

Main purpose of the role

We're recruiting an innovative and experienced Senior AI Engineer to join our client's growing AI team and help scale artificial intelligence across their diverse portfolio of digital platforms and news brands. In this role, you'll be instrumental in implementing production-ready AI solutions that enhance personalisation, accelerate newsroom productivity and improve user experiences across all their channels and brands.

As a Senior AI Engineer, you'll work on challenging problems ranging from content recommendation systems and personalisation engines to AI-powered newsroom tools and automated content workflows. You'll collaborate with cross-functional teams including product managers, data scientists, engineers and editorial teams to deliver AI solutions that directly impact millions of users.

Key responsibilities:

AI production and scaling

• Design, develop and deploy scalable AI/ML systems and pipelines using cloud infrastructure (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure)
• Build and maintain production-grade machine learning models for content recommendation, personalisation and newsroom automation
• Implement MLOps practices including model versioning, automated testing, monitoring and continuous deployment
• Optimise AI model performance, latency and resource utilisation for high-traffic production environments

Personalisation and content intelligence

• Develop and enhance personalisation algorithms that deliver relevant content experiences across web, mobile and emerging platforms
• Build content classification, semantic analysis and recommendation systems using NLP and deep learning techniques
• Implement real-time content processing pipelines for automated tagging, categorisation and content matching
• Create user profiling and behavioural analysis systems to improve content targeting and engagement

Newsroom AI and editorial tools

• Collaborate with editorial teams to develop AI-powered tools that accelerate content creation and curation
• Build automated content workflows, including article summarisation, fact-checking assistance and content optimisation
• Implement AI solutions for news aggregation, content deduplication and trend analysis
• Develop tools for automated social media content generation and distribution optimisation

Technical excellence and innovation

• Write clean, maintainable and well-documented Python code, following software engineering best practices
• Design and implement APIs and microservices for AI model serving and integration
• Conduct experiments with cutting-edge AI technologies, including large language models (LLMs), transformer architectures and generative AI
• Stay current with AI/ML research and evaluate new technologies for potential implementation

Collaboration and community building

• Work closely with product teams to translate business requirements into technical AI solutions
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to knowledge sharing within the client's AI community
• Participate in code reviews, technical discussions and architectural planning sessions
• Collaborate with data scientists to productionise research models and prototypes

Required skills and experience:

Technical Qualifications

• Honours or Masters degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science or a related technical field
• Minimum 5+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years focused on AI/ML development
• Strong proficiency in Python and experience with ML frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn)
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS SageMaker, Google AI Platform, Azure ML) and containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Proven experience building and deploying production ML systems at scale

AI/ML expertise

• Deep understanding of machine learning algorithms, deep learning architectures and neural networks
• Strong experience with NLP, text processing and content recommendation systems
• Knowledge of MLOps practices, including model monitoring, versioning and automated retraining
• Experience with vector databases, embedding-based search and similarity matching algorithms
• Familiarity with transformer models, large language models and modern NLP architecture

Software engineering

• Proficiency in API development (REST, GraphQL) and microservices architecture
• Experience with version control (Git), CI/CD pipelines and automated testing frameworks
• Strong understanding of database technologies (SQL, NoSQL) and data pipeline tools
• Knowledge of software engineering best practices, including design patterns and code quality standards

Preferred Experience

• Experience in media, publishing or content-driven industries
• Knowledge of content management systems and editorial workflows
• Understanding of web analytics, user behaviour analysis and A/B testing methodologies
• Experience with real-time streaming data processing (Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub)
• Familiarity with monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, DataDog)

Personal characteristics

• Innovation-driven: passionate about exploring new AI technologies and finding creative solutions to complex problems
• Collaborative mindset: able to work effectively across multidisciplinary teams and communicate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
• Results-oriented: strong focus on delivering measurable business impact through AI implementations
• Continuous learner: committed to staying current with the rapidly evolving AI/ML landscape and best practices
• Problem-solver: analytical thinking and the ability to break down complex challenges into manageable components
• Quality-focused: attention to detail and commitment to building robust, scalable and maintainable systems

What's On Offer

• Competitive salary, commensurate with experience and skills
• Comprehensive benefits package, including optional medical aid and retirement contributions
• Access to cutting-edge AI/ML infrastructure and tools
• The opportunity to work on high-impact projects reaching millions of users
• Professional development budget for conferences, courses and certifications
• A collaborative, innovation-focused work environment
• Career growth opportunities within one of South Africa's leading media technology companies

This role is being handled on an exclusive basis by our agency; our client's identity will be shared with shortlisted candidates.

As we receive a high volume of applications, we are unfortunately not able to respond individually to every candidate. If you have not heard from us within one month, please take this as confirmation that your application was not successful on this occasion.

Please note that this position is office-based, five days per week.

In line with our client's employment equity policy, preference will be given to suitable candidates from designated groups.