Senior Software Engineer

Badger Holdings (Pty) Ltd; Cape Town; In loco; ZAR 900.000 - 1.500.000; Tempo pieno

Descrizione del lavoro

Badger Holdings is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for ARC AI, to build AI agents that operate autonomously in production environments, connecting to real enterprise data and delivering measurable outcomes. You will own architecture, evaluation pipelines, and backend integrations while enforcing strong guardrails and security boundaries.

The role emphasizes designing for reliable live deployments, with a focus on compliance, governance, and scalable engineering practices in a small, senior

Competenze

• Experience building and shipping AI agent systems in production.
• Ownership of an evaluation pipeline for production AI systems.
• Experience debugging production AI failures in live systems.
• Proficiency in Python and LLM frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, or equivalent).
• RAG architecture: retrieval pipelines, vector DBs, chunking/embedding.
• API design and backend integration at production scale.
• Secure tool access patterns and enforcement at the boundary of AI reasoning.
• CI/CD for agentic systems with instrumentation, staging, and canary deployments.

Mansioni

• Design, build, and operate AI agent systems powering ARC AI products, including architecture, evaluation pipelines, production reliability, guardrails, and backend integrations.
• Set engineering standards and ensure evaluation is first-class; implement boundaries between model and execution; align with POPIA/GDPR from the start.
• Architectural decisions that will shape future engineering work across the team.

Conoscenze

Python

LLM frameworks

AI production experience

Evaluation pipelines

Guardrails

CI/CD for agents

API design

Security boundaries

Debug production failures

Formazione

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science / Software Engineering or related field

Equivalent practical industry experience

Strumenti

LangChain

LlamaIndex

LangGraph

Azure AI tooling

Descrizione del lavoro

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Remuneration: market-related

Location: Cape Town

Job level: Senior

Type: Permanent

Reference: #BH-456

Company: Badger Holdings

Job Description

Senior Software Engineer, Applied AI

Badger SA | ARC AI

On-site | George, WC

Build AI systems that do more than demo well.

About The Role

• ARC AI builds AI agents as products: systems that operate autonomously across business functions, handle real customer interactions, and deliver measurable outcomes in a regulated insurance environment. This is not an experimentation function. We ship.
• We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer who has built and operated AI agent systems in production. Someone who knows what it takes to move an agent from prototype to live deployment, and who understands that evaluation, not iteration speed, separates reliable AI products from expensive demos.

What you will own:

• You will design, build, and operate the AI agent systems that power ARC AI products. This means owning the full arc: architecture, evaluation pipelines, production reliability, guardrails, and the backend integrations that connect agents to real enterprise data.
• You will set the engineering standards the rest of the team follows. Evaluation is a first-class responsibility here, not a QA afterthought. Securing an agent means architecting enforcement outside the model; defences sit at the execution boundary, not inside the system prompt. Compliance with POPIA and GDPR is an architectural decision you make at the start, not a checkpoint at the end.
• The architectural decisions you make in this role will be the ones every subsequent engineer builds on.

What we require:

Non-negotiable

• Demonstrated experience building and shipping AI agent systems in production: not demos, not internal tools that never went live
• Ownership of an evaluation pipeline for a production AI system: you defined the metrics, built the framework, and used it to make deployment decisions
• Experience debugging production AI failures: you have traced a silent agent degradation to its root cause in a live system
• Proficiency in Python and LLM frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, or equivalent)
• RAG architecture: retrieval pipeline design, vector database implementation, chunking and embedding strategy
• API design and backend integration at production scale
• Secure tool access patterns for agentic systems: you know where LLM reasoning ends and deterministic enforcement must begin, and you have built the boundary between them
• Experience implementing guardrails: input validation, output filtering, and execution-layer prompt injection defence
• CI/CD for agentic systems: you have implemented progressive delivery pipelines for agents, including instrumentation of tool invocations and decision points, staging with regression benchmarks, and canary deployment to detect behavioural drift before full rollout

Strong Advantage

• Experience in regulated financial services, insurance, or healthcare environments
• Familiarity with graph-based agentic orchestration frameworks (LangGraph or equivalent), particularly durable execution and human-in-the-loop checkpointing in regulated environments
• Familiarity with Azure AI tooling and services
• MLOps practices: monitoring, observability, cost management for inference workloads
• CRM and enterprise system integration

Educational requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, or a related field
• OR equivalent practical industry experience building and deploying production-grade AI systems

We recognise that exceptional experience and demonstrated capability can be just as valuable as formal qualifications.

Why Join ARC AI?

• Build AI products that are actively used in the real world
• Work in a highly autonomous, engineering-led environment
• Influence architectural decisions from the ground up
• Join a small, senior team with meaningful ownership
• Work on technically challenging problems at the intersection of AI, reliability, and compliance

The environment:

You’ll be part of a small, high-impact team building something from the ground up. There are no layers of separation, no handoffs to QA, DevOps, or external teams. You own what you build.

Your work will directly shape how AI is experienced by real customers in a regulated environment. It’s complex, meaningful, and visible.

We’re based in George, Western Cape, and this role is office-based, giving you the opportunity to collaborate closely, move quickly, and build as a team.

If you’ve built AI products that made it into users’ hands and you’re ready to take full ownership of what comes next, we’d like to hear from you.