Senior AI Engineer

About Us:

We build production AI products for contact-centre and debt-collection operations: real-time voice agents, automated call QA (speech + LLM scoring), and a client-facing platform portal that gives clients observability into AI performance and self-service control over their campaigns and configurations. Upcoming work includes text-based agents for email and WhatsApp.

Team:

Small, agile AI engineering team led by the Head of AI, with a Lead AI Engineer, Senior / Intermediate / Junior AI Engineers, Analyst, and Tester. We work closely with a Frontend Engineer, Lead Backend Engineer (platform portal), Azure DevOps/infra, and the wider IT department. We move quickly and use modern production AI and cloud technologies.

How We Work:

AI development tools such as Cursor and Claude are available and encouraged. Practical knowledge and experience using these (or similar AI coding assistants) is preferable.

Location & Employment:

Johannesburg, with flexibility for remote work depending on the candidate and role needs. All positions are permanent.

Benefits:

Pension, medical aid, life cover, and study allowances by arrangement.

What We’re Looking For:

High-autonomy engineer who designs and ships production AI features end-to-end across voice agents and/or automated call QA, including Azure integrations and evaluation.

Responsibilities

• Build and harden real-time voice agents: modular prompts, multi-assistant flows, tool-calling, webhooks, telephony/operational concerns
• Improve automated QA pipelines: VAD, diarization, language gating, transcription, alignment/attribution, LLM scorecard scoring
• Implement structured LLM pipelines (schemas, batching, failure handling, score recalculation)
• Own features in Azure Functions / Kubernetes workers: queue consumers, artefact pipelines, SQL integrations
• Contribute to post-call intelligence features such as outcome scoring, summary generation, and structured data extraction
• Expand and maintain evaluation suites (scenarios, LLM-as-judge, CI regression)
• Contribute to email/WhatsApp agent work with reuse of tools, outcomes, and observability
• Review code; unblock Intermediate/Junior engineers; improve runbooks and operational quality
• Use AI coding tools (e.g. Cursor, Claude) as a normal part of day-to-day delivery

Must-Have Skills & Experience

• 5+ years engineering; 2+ years applied LLM / speech AI in production
• Strong Python (APIs, typing/validation, testing, packaging)
• OpenAI / Azure OpenAI (chat, structured outputs, batch patterns)
• Azure messaging, storage, and SQL-backed services
• Proven ownership of ambiguous, multi-system features

Preferable / Strong Advantages

• Experience with Cursor, Claude, or similar AI coding assistants
• Voice agent stacks; latency, barge-in, endpointing awareness
• Speech ML in production (PyTorch, Whisper, diarization, ONNX, GPU Docker)
• vLLM / guided decoding; Kubernetes worker patterns
• Contact-centre QA or collections domain
• SQLAlchemy / Azure SQL; IaC awareness or strong infra collaboration