Lead AI Engineer

A leading South African packaging manufacturer that specializes in producing corrugated packaging and Single Face Kraft (SFK) products is seeking a Lead AI Engineer who will be the technical owner of an internally built agentic system that currently runs the companys planning cycle end-to-end.

Responsibilities:

• Production Governance: Own existing agentic MRP/planning systems; establish source control managed environments clear documentation and formal deployment pipelines.

• Risk and Fallback Management: Eliminate single points of failure (technical and operational). Maintain tested rollbacks kill-switches and documented manual fallback plans.

• Bounded Autonomy and Safety: Program hard limits on agent scope/financial values enforce human-in-the-loop approval gates for irreversible actions and ensure loud failures over silent errors.

• Eval Harnesses: Build and run historical evaluation test suites against all prompt code or model updates prior to deployment.

• Staged Releases: Enforce a strict rollout pathway (Shadow Running $rightarrow$ Pilot $rightarrow$ Canary $rightarrow$ Earned Autonomy).

• Observability and Auditing: Implement complete telemetry (inputs reasoning logs actions) and queryable audit trails that satisfy financial and governance standards.

• Process Discovery: Engage directly with factory floor and business operations to understand actual workflows before designing automation.

• End-to-End Delivery: Scope architect and build scalable systems across planning logistics procurement and financerecommending go/no-go based on pilot metrics.

• Commercial Controls: Ensure financial actions adhere to CFO/external audit requirements (segregation of duties approval limits).

• Tooling and AI-Assisted Dev: Leverage modern AI dev tools (e.g. Cursor Claude Code) as primary workflows with rigorous code review and testing standards.

• Vendor and Cost Management: Direct model selection transaction cost optimization data residency and vendor lock-in prevention.

• Enablement and Reporting: Provide runbooks and training for business users; report directly to executive leadership on progress risk and technical debt.

• Production Release Discipline: Proven track record of owning commercial software running in live production (including staging canary rollouts incident handling and rollbacks). Prototypes or internal tools only will not be shortlisted.

• End-to-End System Shipping: Demonstrable history of delivering full-lifecycle software solutions including error handling monitoring and handover.

• Engineering Background: Minimum 8 years in software engineering with 3 years in a Senior Lead or Principal role. Strong software engineering fundamentals take precedence over pure ML research.

• AI-Assisted Workflows: High fluency with AI-assisted development tools (Cursor Claude Code or equivalent) assessed via live practical evaluation.

• Desirable Experience

  • Practical experience building with LLMs and agentic workflows (prompt engineering tool use evaluation frameworks handling non-determinism).

  • Familiarity with ERP MRP or manufacturing supply chain environments.

  • Willingness to master corrugated packaging and manufacturing process nuances.

Benefits:

Competitive salary based on experience (salary can potentially be more based on experience/skills)

IF you meet the above requirements and want to make a career-changing move apply today by emailing your CV to