Senior AI LLM Engineer: Voice Agents & Scalable AI

e-Merge IT Recruitment; Sandton; On-site; ZAR 1,080,000 - 1,320,000; Full time

Job summary

e-Merge IT Recruitment is seeking a Senior AI Engineer to design and implement real-time voice agents and scalable AI pipelines in a hands-on, production-focused environment in Sandton. You will work across LLMs, voice agents, automated testing, AI coding tools, and modern software practices.

You will bring 5+ years of engineering experience with 2+ years in applied LLM/speech AI, strong Python skills, and hands-on OpenAI/Azure OpenAI experience.

Qualifications

• 5+ years engineering; 2+ years applied LLM / speech AI in production.
• Strong Python (APIs, typing/validation, testing, packaging).
• OpenAI / Azure OpenAI (chat, structured outputs, batch patterns).
• Azure messaging, storage, and SQL-backed services.

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).

Skills

Python

LLM / speech AI

OpenAI / Azure OpenAI

Azure messaging

SQL-backed services

Ownership

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

PyTorch

Job description

e-Merge IT Recruitment is seeking a Senior AI Engineer to design and implement real-time voice agents and scalable AI pipelines in a hands-on, production-focused environment in Sandton. You will work across LLMs, voice agents, automated testing, AI coding tools, and modern software practices.

You will bring 5+ years of engineering experience with 2+ years in applied LLM/speech AI, strong Python skills, and hands-on OpenAI/Azure OpenAI experience.