Lead AI LLM Engineer – Sandton – R1.5m PA

BUILD AI THAT DOESN’T JUST TALK! IT DELIVERS.

If you’re a hands-on AI Engineer who wants to take ownership of real-world AI systems and help move them from “this is cool” to “this is running in production”, this could be your next challenge.

We’re looking for a Lead AI LLM Engineer to join a forward-thinking technology environment where you’ll help shape and build the next generation of AI-powered and conversational solutions.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You’ll still be close to the technology while helping guide engineers, make architecture decisions and turn ambitious AI ideas into scalable, reliable production systems.

THIS IS WHERE IT GETS INTERESTING

You’ll work across some seriously exciting areas:

LLMs | Voice Agents | Speech AI | AI Evaluation | Multi-Agent Systems | Tool Calling | AI-Assisted Development

You could be working on everything from voice agents and speech pipelines to post-call intelligence, conversational AI and automated QA.

WHAT YOU’LL BRING

We’re looking for someone with:

• 7+ years’ software engineering experience
• 3+ years’ experience shipping LLM and/or speech + LLM solutions into production
• Deep experience in at least two of the following:
• Voice / conversational agents
• Speech pipelines, including STT, diarisation and VAD
• LLM evaluation
• Multi-agent and tool-calling systems
• Experience designing prompts for multi-step, compliance-sensitive workflows
• Proven experience leading and mentoring engineers within a small Agile team

NICE TO HAVE:

Experience with:

• Claude, Cursor or other AI coding assistants
• Voice platforms and STT/TTS vendor optimisation
• Whisper, diarisation, vLLM, OpenAI Batch and structured outputs
• Contact centre, collections or BPO environments
• Application monitoring and observability
• CI/CD and production operations
• WhatsApp and email-based conversational bots

WHAT YOU’LL ACTUALLY BE DOING:

You’ll take ownership of major AI initiatives and help turn them into production-ready systems.

That includes:

• Owning end-to-end delivery across areas such as voice agents, speech/LLM QA, post-call intelligence and text-channel agents
• Partnering with the Head of AI on architecture, priorities and production risk
• Designing and building production AI services on Azure
• Leading prompt and agent design
• Building LLM evaluation and regression frameworks
• Improving reliability across latency, cost, failures and observability
• Driving quality and accuracy across post-call intelligence solutions
• Mentoring engineers through design reviews, pairing and code reviews
• Working with platform teams to ensure AI products, dashboards and runtime environments remain aligned
• Collaborating with Azure DevOps around deployment, infrastructure and GPU/LLM cost optimisation

THE PERSON WE’R LOOKING FOR:

You’re not just interested in AI.

You’re interested in building AI that works.

You understand that getting an LLM demo running is one thing.

Getting an AI system to operate reliably, securely, efficiently and at scale in production is something else entirely.

You’re technically strong, commercially minded and comfortable taking ownership.

You can lead from the front, mentor the team and still jump into the code when the problem gets difficult.

If you want to help build the future of conversational AI — this is worth a conversation.

THE DETAILS

Reference: GZ61522

Type: Permanent

Salary: R1.5m per annum, negotiable based on experience and ability

Contact Garth:

garthz@e-merge.co.za

011 463 3633

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