AI Engineer

Job Specifics

• Location: Melrose, Johannesburg
  
• Work Model: Hybrid
  
• Employment Type: Permanent | Full-time
  
• Level: Mid-level
  

About the Role

An exciting opportunity is available for a mid-level AI Engineer to join a newly established AI Engineering team within an international technology-enabled organisation operating in the tax, compliance and regulatory space.

The successful candidate will design, build, deploy and scale LLM-powered applications that solve real-world business problems and move rapidly into production.

As part of a founding AI team, the role offers the opportunity to influence technical architecture, engineering standards and how AI solutions are developed across the organisation.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and deliver LLM-powered applications, including RAG, structured extraction and AI agents.
  
• Build AI solutions from prototype through to production.
  
• Develop evaluation frameworks, datasets, scoring and regression testing.
  
• Build and maintain production APIs and services.
  
• Monitor solution performance, reliability, cost and latency.
  
• Work with subject-matter experts to translate complex domain knowledge into AI product behaviour.
  
• Develop reusable patterns for prompts, guardrails, data contracts and human-review workflows.
  
• Contribute to technical and architectural decisions within the growing AI function.
  

Technical Environment

• AI & LLM: OpenAI, Claude, RAG, AI Agents, Vector Search, Fine-tuning, Prompt Engineering
  
• Engineering: Python, TypeScript, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Docker, CI/CD
  
• Platform: Cloud Infrastructure, APIs, Observability & Monitoring
  

Requirements

Essential Requirements

• 3+ years' software engineering experience, including shipping and owning production software.
  
• Strong Python development skills.
  
• Hands-on experience with LLM APIs, prompting, retrieval/RAG and structured outputs.
  
• Experience developing and working with APIs.
  
• Comfortable working across different areas of an application when required.
  
• Strong problem-solving skills with a practical, delivery-focused mindset.
  
• Clear communication skills and the ability to explain technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders.
  
• A proactive, self-starting approach with the ability to work effectively in a developing technical environment.
  

Advantageous

• AI/LLM evaluation tooling.
  
• Document AI or OCR.
  
• Experience with multilingual or unstructured data.
  
• Fintech, tax, compliance or other regulated-industry experience.
  
• Vector search, AI agents or fine-tuning experience.
  
• Open-source contributions or demonstrable AI side projects.
  

Why Consider This Opportunity?

This is an opportunity to join an AI Engineering function at an early stage and work on production AI applications rather than proof-of-concept projects. The successful candidate will have meaningful input into how solutions are designed and built while working with complex, large-scale international data.