Senior ML Engineer: Production ML & Real-Time Systems

Lulalend; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 600,000 - 900,000; Full time

Job summary

Lula is seeking a skilled ML Engineer to join the data science- engineering frontier in Cape Town. You will build, deploy, and scale ML systems, improving infrastructure and real-time data platforms to keep models running efficiently in production.

You will collaborate with data scientists and DevOps to implement reliable systems, design for performance, and apply rigorous software engineering practices across CI/CD/CT, testing, and automation.

Qualifications

• Productionising ML systems is required.
• Experience training ML models is highly desirable.
• Advanced knowledge of Python and SQL.
• Terraform for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) expertise.
• Hands-on with real-time/event-driven systems (Kafka, Kafka Connect, Pub/Sub).
• Kubernetes and Docker experience; deployment strategies like canary, blue-green.
• CI/CD tools: CircleCI, Drone, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD.
• Big Data tech: Spark, Dataflow, and Flink.
• Strong system design skills focusing on performance and trade-offs.
• Experience applying software engineering rigor to ML (CI/CD/CT, unit testing, automation).
• Hands-on with MLOps tools: Kubeflow, DVC, MLFlow.
• Cloud providers: GCP, AWS, or Azure.
• Interest or experience in FinTech space.

Responsibilities

• Consult with data scientists on training machine learning models
• Support improvements to ML infrastructure, including data engineering and DevOps
• Design systems to meet throughput and latency requirements
• Implement NFRs to ensure a high degree of system reliability

Job description

Lula is seeking a skilled ML Engineer to join the data science- engineering frontier in Cape Town. You will build, deploy, and scale ML systems, improving infrastructure and real-time data platforms to keep models running efficiently in production.

You will collaborate with data scientists and DevOps to implement reliable systems, design for performance, and apply rigorous software engineering practices across CI/CD/CT, testing, and automation.