Senior AI Software Engineer

We are looking for a highly experienced Senior AI Software Engineer to help design, build, and scale production-grade AI-enabled software systems within a modern engineering environment.

This role is suited to a senior individual contributor who thrives in deeply technical environments and is passionate about engineering quality, platform reliability, distributed systems, and pragmatic AI integration. You will work closely with engineering leadership, platform teams, and security stakeholders to deliver resilient, observable, and secure software systems that operate at enterprise scale.

Key responsibilities:

• Design, build, and maintain scalable backend services and AI-enabled applications.
• Develop secure, observable, and production-ready distributed systems.
• Contribute hands-on across architecture, implementation, code review, testing, and operational readiness.
• Design and evolve APIs, service integrations, and message-driven workflows.
• Collaborate with platform, infrastructure, security, and engineering teams to deliver reliable software solutions.
• Drive engineering best practices across:
• CI/CD
• Testing automation
• Observability
• Security engineering
• Release governance
• Participate in technical design discussions and provide mentorship to engineering teams.
• Translate complex technical and AI engineering decisions into clear technical documentation for engineering, security, and audit stakeholders.
• Support continuous improvement initiatives across engineering quality, reliability, and delivery processes.

Essential engineering experience:

• 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, including experience operating at senior, staff, or principal engineer level.
• Proven experience shipping production systems that other engineers and teams depend on.
• Deep proficiency in at least one modern backend language such as:
• Python
• TypeScript / Node.js
• Java
• Go
• AI/ML platform integration
• LLM application development
• Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
• Vector databases
• Kubernetes / Docker
• Cloud platforms (AWS preferred)
• Terraform / Infrastructure-as-Code

Reference number for this position is GZ61340 which is a contract position based in Midrand / Hybrid offering a cost to company salary of R900k per annum negotiable on experience and ability. Contact Garth on az.oc.egrem-e@zhtrag or call him on 011 463 3633 to discuss this and other opportunities.

Are you ready for a change of scenery? The E-Merge IT recruitment is a specialist niche recruitment agency. We offer our candidates options so that we can successfully place the right developers with the right companies in the right roles. Check out the e-Merge website www.e-merge.co.za for more great positions.

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Posted on 28 May 09:38, Closing date 27 Jul