Senior AI LLM Engineer — Real-Time Voice Systems

E-Merge; Sandton; On-site; ZAR 1,000,000 - 1,400,000; Full time

Job summary

E-Merge in Sandton is seeking an experienced AI engineer to build real-time voice agents and scalable AI solutions. You will work across LLMs, voice stacks, automated testing, and modern software practices to turn ambitious AI concepts into production-ready systems.

This permanent role offers a competitive salary of about R1.2 million per year, negotiable by experience, and the opportunity to own cross-system features end-to-end in a cutting-edge AI environment, with strong focus on delivery and

Qualifications

• 5+ years engineering experience with 2+ years in production LLM / speech AI.
• Strong Python (APIs, typing, testing, packaging).
• Experience with OpenAI / Azure OpenAI in production.
• Azure storage, messaging, and SQL-backed services.
• Proven ownership of ambiguous, multi-system features.

Responsibilities

• Build and harden real-time voice agents: modular prompts, multi-assistant flows, tool-calling, webhooks, telephony/operational concerns
• Improve automated QA pipelines: VAD, diarization, language gating, transcription, alignment/attribution, LLM scorecard scoring
• Implement structured LLM pipelines (schemas, batching, failure handling, score recalculation)
• Own features in Azure Functions / Kubernetes workers: queue consumers, artifact pipelines, SQL integrations
• Contribute to post-call intelligence features such as outcome scoring, summary generation, and structured data extraction
• Expand and maintain evaluation suites (scenarios, LLM-as-judge, CI regression)
• Contribute to email/WhatsApp agent work with reuse of tools, outcomes, and observability

Skills

Python

LLM / speech AI

OpenAI / Azure OpenAI

Azure SQL

Multi-system ownership

Production systems

Tools

Azure Functions

Kubernetes

SQLAlchemy

Job description

E-Merge in Sandton is seeking an experienced AI engineer to build real-time voice agents and scalable AI solutions. You will work across LLMs, voice stacks, automated testing, and modern software practices to turn ambitious AI concepts into production-ready systems.

This permanent role offers a competitive salary of about R1.2 million per year, negotiable by experience, and the opportunity to own cross-system features end-to-end in a cutting-edge AI environment, with strong focus on delivery and