AI Engineering Lead

About Us

At Embelo, we're dedicated to helping founders of consulting businesses start and scale efficiently. Backed by our UK-based investors and clients, we deliver exceptional client services to a growing group of UK businesses, combining technical expertise, South African spirit, and the latest in AI-powered services. One of those is Inference Group, a fast-growing data and AI Engineering business on a mission to help businesses unlock their true potential and drive sustainable growth.

The Opportunity

We're looking for an hands-on AI Engineering Lead to shape the future of our South African AI team and play a pivotal role in growing our AI capability.

You'll bring strong software engineering foundations, deep practical AI development experience and the architectural judgement to navigate complex enterprise environments. From integrating AI across multiple systems and cloud platforms to making critical technical decisions in regulated, security-conscious environments, you'll help turn ambitious AI ideas into scalable, production-ready solutions.

This is an opportunity to make your mark: setting technical direction, leading and developing talented engineers, and working directly with international teams and enterprise clients. You'll have the autonomy to influence how we build, the opportunity to grow a high-performing team and the ability to remain close to the technology you love.

We value different paths into technical leadership. What matters is your ability to combine engineering depth with sound judgement, inspire others and deliver technology that creates meaningful business value.

What You'll Be Doing

Technical Leadership & AI Engineering

• Lead the architecture, design and delivery of complex, production-grade AI solutions, including GenAI, LLMs and agentic systems.
• Provide hands-on technical direction across projects, guiding engineers through complex design, development and integration challenges.
• Architect scalable solutions across enterprise systems, cloud platforms and data environments, ensuring seamless integration with existing technologies.
• Set technical standards for architecture, coding, testing, deployment and performance, ensuring solutions are secure, maintainable and scalable.
• Review technical approaches and guide key decisions around AI frameworks, emerging technologies, tooling and build-versus-buy considerations.

Team Leadership & Development

• Lead and manage our South African AI engineering team, taking ownership of technical performance, delivery quality and professional development.
• Mentor, coach and support engineers through regular feedback, technical guidance and knowledge sharing, creating a culture of continuous learning.
• Support hiring, onboarding, resource planning and the ongoing growth of our South African engineering capability.

Client Engagement & Delivery

• Act as the senior technical point of contact for projects involving the SA team, working closely with clients, consultants, data engineers and international delivery leads.
• Translate complex business challenges into effective AI solutions, confidently advising stakeholders and challenging technical assumptions where needed.
• Guide solutions from initial concept through to production, balancing innovation with commercial value, security, governance and long-term maintainability.
• Contribute to strategic client conversations, helping organisations understand how AI can deliver meaningful, sustainable business value.

What You Bring

• Strong software engineering foundations with deep, hands-on AI development experience.
• Proven experience architecting and delivering AI solutions in complex enterprise environments.
• Experience leading engineering teams, mentoring technical talent and taking ownership of delivery.
• Strong knowledge of Python, LLMs, GenAI, agentic frameworks and modern software architecture.
• Experience with cloud platforms (Azure, AWS and or GCP), enterprise integration and data technologies such as Databricks.
• Sound understanding of data security, governance and scalable production systems.
• Strong consulting and stakeholder engagement skills, with the confidence to advise and challenge senior clients.

Experience we'd particularly value:

• A background in a major technology or management consultancy, or a specialist enterprise technology business.
• Experience working across multiple enterprise systems and business domains.
• Exposure to regulated environments such as banking, financial services or telecommunications.

We're more interested in your technical depth, leadership ability and track record than an exhaustive list of tools or a particular career path.

Why Join Us?

This is an opportunity to shape our South African AI engineering capability, lead a talented team and work with international colleagues on challenging enterprise AI initiatives.

You'll have the freedom to influence technical direction, stay close to emerging technology and build solutions that move beyond prototypes into meaningful production environments.

We value diverse perspectives and different paths into technology leadership. If you're passionate about great engineering and developing great people, we'd love to hear from you.

Working With Us:

Inference Group is a young, fast-growing consultancy built by people who are naturally curious and genuinely love what they do. We work on interesting problems, value learning, and care deeply about delivering solutions that actually work in the real world.

We’re committed to hiring future leaders and investing in their growth - through hands-on experience, mentorship, access to the latest technologies, and ongoing training and certifications. AI moves fast, and we make it our job to stay ahead of the curve, together.

You’ll have the opportunity to shape AI adoption at scale within global organisations, work at the forefront of GenAI and enterprising tool decisions, and the chance to help shape something special - and yes, we’ll have a lot of fun along the way.

> We Geek Out Loud: we excel in our data and AI domain, using our expertise to deliver solutions that realise value. We share our wisdom and experience proudly, no egos, just pure tech passion.

> We Act Boldly, and Collaborate Openly: we explore uncharted territories, working on the new to deliver operational solutions at scale. We don’t tread over old ground. We collaborate openly with full transparency, learning from each other as a community.

> We are the Connectors: we bridge the gaps between business value, data engineering, data science and deployment. Working seamlessly as one unified team internally and externally to deliver working solutions for our clients.

> We Empower our Customers: we equip our clients with the skills and knowledge to fully leverage, scale and deploy data and AI solutions. We prioritise delivering operational success over prototypes and proof of concepts to provide long term value. We build trust.

> We Love our Work: we are proud of the work we do and take ownership of it. We work on the things we love and care about, we work with passion with people we respect.

> We are Data Jedis: we work on hard problems and aim to deliver working solutions at scale. We don’t have time for politics, backbiting, gossiping, game playing or selfish behaviour. We work as one team with a mission to deliver and we will only achieve that together.