Senior AI Engineer

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. 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 • SQLAlchemy / Azure SQL; IaC awareness or strong infra collaboration #J-18808-Ljbffr