AI Engineer

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

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.

• 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.
  

• 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
  

• 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.
  

• 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.
  

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.