Senior Software Engineer

Badger Holdings; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,500,000; Full time

Job summary

Badger SA | ARC AI in George, Western Cape, on-site, is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design, build and operate AI agent systems powering ARC AI products.

You will own the full arc: architecture, evaluation pipelines, production reliability, guardrails, and the backend integrations to connect agents to enterprise data, while enforcing compliance with POPIA and GDPR from the start.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and operate the AI agent systems powering ARC AI products.
• Own architecture, evaluation pipelines, production reliability, guardrails and backend integrations to enterprise data.
• Set engineering standards; evaluate as a first-class responsibility; secure at the execution boundary.
• Ensure compliance with POPIA and GDPR from the start as an architectural decision.

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

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.