Vice President of Engineering - Process Intelligence, Data & AI

Nintex; Johannesburg; Hybrid; ZAR 1,200,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading process automation company in Johannesburg seeks a Vice President of Engineering to lead AI and data engineering efforts. This executive will define the technical direction and own delivery of innovations in process intelligence. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in cloud-native SaaS, AI capabilities, and leading cross-functional teams. A hybrid work model is offered with numerous perks and benefits.

Benefits

Global Gratitude and Recharge Days

Flexible paid time off policy

Employee wellness programs

Paid parental leave

Invention/patenting assistance

Qualifications

• 12 years of engineering leadership experience in cloud-native SaaS and platform companies.
• Proven track record launching enterprise capabilities leveraging AI/ML workflows.
• Experience designing and scaling data platforms and data pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Set the vision and execute a comprehensive engineering roadmap.
• Collaborate with Product and Data Science teams.
• Drive decisions around architecture and investment priorities.

Skills

AI engineering capabilities

Data platform design and scaling

Cloud-native SaaS experience

Cross-functional team building

Effective communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science

Advanced degree in AI or Data Engineering

Tools

Databricks

AWS

Azure

GCP

Job description

Overview

About Nintex: At Nintex we are transforming the way people work everywhere. As the global standard for process intelligence and automation, we are trusted by over 10,000 public and private sector organizations across 90 countries. Our customers—from industry leaders like Amazon, Coca-Cola, and Microsoft—rely on the Nintex Platform to accelerate digital transformation by managing, automating, and optimizing business processes. We are committed to fostering a workplace that supports amazing people in doing their very best work every day.

Working in engineering: Our engineers are process experts building the industry’s most complete process and automation platform to transform the way people work. If you’re curious and eager to learn, the sky is the limit here. We take a solutions-oriented and collaborative approach, constantly innovating our business and products.

About the role: We are seeking a highly strategic and execution-oriented Vice President of Engineering to lead our next chapter of innovation in AI, data-driven platforms, and process intelligence. This executive will own the technical direction, architecture, and delivery of our AI and data engineering capabilities, as well as modernizing our process intelligence products to ensure our platform is intelligent, scalable, and enterprise-ready.

You will lead high-performing engineering teams across three strategic priorities, partnering closely with product, platform, and go-to-market leaders.

• Advancing our AI engineering capabilities, driving the development of common AI frameworks, multi-agent architecture, AI infrastructure & governance model selection & training, and context engineering that accelerates AI capabilities for customers to build, operate, manage, and optimize automation solutions on the Nintex platform
• Modernizing and differentiating our process intelligence capabilities that help customers identify, govern, and optimize processes across their organization
• Building a centralized data intelligence platform that serves as the single source of truth for customer analytics, internal business intelligence, and AI needs across all products

This role offers a unique opportunity to own a growing vertical SaaS product as well as strategic platform capabilities to shape the Nintex vision through execution.

Your contribution will be:

Strategic Leadership

• Set the vision, define and execute a comprehensive engineering roadmap aligned with business strategy
• Collaborate closely with Product, Data Science, and Platform teams to evangelize development and adoption to accelerate platform strategy
• Drive key decisions around architecture, build vs. buy, open-source, technical debt, data governance, and investment priorities
• Represent our Process Management, Data, and AI strategy to executive stakeholders, customers, partners, and industry as needed

Technical Leadership

• Build and own common AI frameworks, AI platform and infrastructure components, and multi-agent architecture, RAG patterns, orchestration & governance patterns across the platform
• Create systems to leverage and experiment with best-of-breed AI innovation while balancing performance, cost, and quality
• Evolve process intelligence capabilities using modern cloud-native, multi-tenant technology to unlock superior customer experience, development velocity, and operational efficiency
• Lead design and implementation of a unified data platform from ingestion to processing through transformation pipelines leveraging Databricks Delta Lake
• Drive adoption of a modern data stack for core platform orchestration, streaming, data quality, metadata management, monitoring, and governance
• Ensure platform scalability, reliability, and performance to support rapidly growing usage while easing adoption by customers and internal teams

Engineering Management

• Recruit, grow, and lead exceptional engineering talent across AI and data engineering
• Foster a culture of technical excellence, innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning
• Build urgency to move fast while balancing engineering excellence, scalability, and security

Success in the first 18 months

• Launch agentic AI build experience for full-scale process automation solutions leveraging five product domains
• Establish AI best practices to accelerate runtime AI capabilities across the platform
• Evolve platform intelligence capabilities to a modern cloud-native system seamlessly integrated within the Nintex Automation Platform
• Successfully migrate five major products to the unified data platform
• Achieve 99.9% platform uptime with best-in-class data latency SLAs
• Demonstrate improved deployment velocity and cost-effectiveness for data and AI use cases across engineering teams

Requirements to be successful

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field; advanced degree in AI or Data Engineering a plus
• 12 years of engineering leadership experience in cloud-native SaaS and/or platform companies, including 5 years in AI and data-intensive environments
• Proven track record of launching enterprise capabilities leveraging AI/ML workflows, including modern LLM, SLM, LAM, Reasoning, and Multi-Modal generative approaches
• Experience designing and scaling data platforms (batch and real-time) and data pipelines that power enterprise-grade AI solutions; preferably leveraging Databricks
• Demonstrated ability to build and scale cross-functional teams spanning product, data, and/or AI engineering
• Strong track record of translating business goals into technical execution plans and measurable outcomes
• Experience managing global engineering organizations across multiple time zones, fostering clarity, consistency, and collaboration
• Clear, compelling communicator with the ability to influence technical and non-technical audiences
• Direct experience with public cloud IaaS and PaaS (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) and familiarity with modern data & ML architecture paradigms
• Hands-on leader with a bias to action and the ability to lead by example

What’s in it for you

Nintex has a hybrid working model enabling us to build culture, learn and grow together. This role is hybrid in our local Nintex office.

We offer a range of perks and benefits, including:

• Global Gratitude and Recharge Days
• Flexible paid time off policy
• Employee wellness programs and counseling resources
• Meaningful peer recognition and awards
• Paid parental leave
• Invention/patenting assistance
• Community impact paid volunteer time and opportunities
• Intercultural learning and celebration
• Multiple tools to learn and grow within our global community

EEO/Benefits note: View more about our benefits here. Preference will be given to People Living with Disability who are members of designated groups in line with the Employment Equity Plan and Targets of the Company.

Employment details

Employment Type: Full Time

Experience: years

Vacancy: 1