Senior Backend Engineer: AI Systems & API Orchestration

ManpowerGroup; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 700,000 - 1,000,000; Full time

Job summary

ManpowerGroup is seeking an experienced backend engineer to design, build, and maintain scalable systems and APIs for enterprise AI-enabled solutions in Cape Town. You will own features end-to-end, ensure reliability and security, and collaborate closely with clients to translate requirements into robust technical designs.

You will mentor junior engineers and contribute to best practices while working with modern cloud infrastructure and event-driven architectures.

Qualifications

• At least 5 years’ experience in backend engineering.
• Strong programming skills in Python or TypeScript (Node.js).
• Proven experience designing APIs and integrating third-party systems.
• Good knowledge of PostgreSQL or similar relational databases, including data modelling and query optimisation.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, logging and monitoring.
• Demonstrated experience building and deploying LLM-powered features or applications into production.
• Experience working with queues and event-driven architecture.
• Ability to explain technical concepts and trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.
• Previous experience mentoring or leading junior engineers.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain scalable backend systems, APIs and third-party integrations.
• Develop and optimise AI-powered applications and agent orchestration systems.
• Take ownership of features from design through deployment, monitoring and improvement.
• Ensure system reliability, performance, security and uptime across production environments.
• Collaborate with enterprise clients to scope technical requirements and support proofs-of-concept.
• Translate client needs into practical technical solutions and communicate decisions to non-technical stakeholders.
• Monitor deployed AI agents, evaluate performance and report business value.
• Mentor junior implementation engineers and contribute to engineering best practices.

Skills

Python

TypeScript

API design

PostgreSQL

Cloud

CI/CD

Logging & monitoring

LLM features

Event-driven

Mentoring

Tools

Supabase

n8n

Job description

ManpowerGroup is seeking an experienced backend engineer to design, build, and maintain scalable systems and APIs for enterprise AI-enabled solutions in Cape Town. You will own features end-to-end, ensure reliability and security, and collaborate closely with clients to translate requirements into robust technical designs.

You will mentor junior engineers and contribute to best practices while working with modern cloud infrastructure and event-driven architectures.