Ai Developer

AI ENGINEER (INTERMEDIATE)

Location: Cape Town, South Africa

Liquid Thought is a Cape Town based digital experience and innovation studio with 25 years' experience as a digital partner to brands. We design, build, launch, market and scale digital platforms, products and experiences for clients ranging from tier one retailers to growing SMEs, across financial services, retail, telecoms, healthcare and more. We're a high performing team working at the intersection of strategy, digital execution and marketing, and we're growing our AI capability.

Main purpose of the role

We're looking for an experienced AI Engineer to join our team and help bring artificial intelligence into the solutions we build for our clients. In this role, you'll design, build and deploy production AI solutions that add real value to ecommerce platforms, digital products and customer experiences.

You'll take ownership of challenging problems, from personalisation and recommendation engines to LLM powered assistants and automated workflows. You'll collaborate with strategists, product owners, designers and engineers to deliver AI solutions that make a measurable difference for our clients and their customers.

Key responsibilities:

1. AI production and delivery
   - Design, develop and deploy AI/ML solutions and pipelines using cloud infrastructure (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure)
   - Build and maintain production machine learning models that power features in the platforms and products we build
   - Implement MLOps practices including model versioning, automated testing, monitoring and continuous deployment
   - Optimise model performance, latency and cost for production environments
2. Applied AI for client solutions
   - Build personalisation and recommendation features for ecommerce and digital platforms
   - Develop NLP solutions such as content classification, semantic search and intelligent tagging
   - Integrate large language models (LLMs) and generative AI into client products, including assistants, summarisation and content automation
   - Work with vector databases and embedding based search to build retrieval and matching solutions
3. Client and product collaboration
   - Work with multidisciplinary teams to turn client requirements into practical AI solutions
   - Help scope AI features and explain technical options and trade offs to clients and stakeholders without a technical background
   - Contribute to proofs of concept that help clients explore what AI can do for their business
4. Technical excellence and innovation
   - Write clean, maintainable and well documented Python code, following software engineering best practices
   - Design and implement APIs and microservices for AI model serving and integration
   - Experiment with LLMs, transformer architectures and generative AI
   - Stay current with AI/ML developments and share new approaches with the team
5. Collaboration
   - Participate in code reviews, technical discussions and architecture conversations
   - Support junior team members through code reviews and knowledge sharing
   - Collaborate with data scientists and engineers to take prototypes into production

Required skills and experience:

• Technical qualifications
  - Degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science or a related technical field (Honours or Masters advantageous)
  - 3 to 5 years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years focused on AI/ML development
  - Strong proficiency in Python and experience with ML frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit learn)
  - Hands on experience with cloud platforms (AWS SageMaker, Google AI Platform, Azure ML) and Docker
  - Demonstrable experience building and deploying ML models in production

• AI/ML expertise
  - Strong understanding of machine learning algorithms, deep learning architectures and neural networks
  - Experience with NLP, text processing and recommendation systems
  - Working knowledge of MLOps practices, including model monitoring, versioning and retraining
  - Familiarity with vector databases, embedding based search and similarity matching
  - Familiarity with transformer models, large language models and modern NLP architecture

• Software engineering
  - Experience with API development (REST, GraphQL) and microservices
  - Experience with Git, CI/CD pipelines and automated testing frameworks
  - Good understanding of database technologies (SQL, NoSQL) and data pipeline tools
  - Knowledge of software engineering best practices, including design patterns and code quality standards

Preferred experience:
- Experience in a studio, agency or consultancy environment, delivering for multiple clients
- Experience in ecommerce, financial services, retail, telecoms or healthcare
- Experience with Kubernetes in production
- Understanding of web analytics, user behaviour analysis and A/B testing
- Experience with real time streaming data processing (Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub)
- Familiarity with monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, DataDog)
- Experience working with Jira and GitHub

Personal characteristics:
- Driven by innovation: passionate about exploring new AI technologies and finding creative solutions
- Collaborative: able to work across multidisciplinary teams and explain technical concepts to people without a technical background
- Focused on results: committed to delivering measurable impact for clients
- Continuous learner: keeps up with the fast moving AI/ML landscape
- Problem solver: analytical, with the ability to break complex challenges into manageable parts
- Quality conscious: attentive to detail and committed to building robust, scalable and maintainable systems

What's on offer:
- A competitive salary, commensurate with your experience and skills
- A place in a high performing team that sets a high bar and backs each other to reach it
- High impact work: bringing AI into the platforms, products and digital experiences we build for clients ranging from tier one retailers to growing SMEs
- Variety across industries including financial services, retail, telecoms and healthcare, and across web, mobile, platform engineering and financial technology, so no two projects feel the same
- Real ownership, taking solutions from idea through to launch and seeing the difference they make for our clients and their customers
- The chance to help shape how AI is applied in a studio with 25 years of experience as a digital partner to leading brands
- A creative, people first culture that invests deeply in craft, quality and the growth of our team
- A collaborative, innovation focused environment where new ideas are welcomed, tested and built on

As we receive a high volume of applications, we are unfortunately not able to respond individually to every candidate. If you have not heard from us within one month, please take this as confirmation that your application was not successful on this occasion.

Please note that this position is based in the office, five days per week.

In line with our employment equity policy, preference will be given to suitable candidates from designated groups.