Senior AI Developer

About the company

Our client is a well-established South African fintech in the payments space, building AI into its products and operations.

About the role

We're looking for a Senior AI Developer to build production AI systems. This is a hands-on role for someone who has already shipped LLM-based systems beyond simple request and response, and who uses AI across the full delivery lifecycle with the discipline a regulated payments environment requires.

Key responsibilities

• Design and build services in Python and .NET that integrate with large language models
• Build content embedding and retrieval pipelines for RAG
• Design agentic journeys and long-running workflows, with human-in-the-loop checkpoints where decisions need oversight
• Set up evals to measure the quality and reliability of model output
• Add observability so agent behaviour can be traced and debugged in production
• Use AI tools across planning, coding, testing and release, and validate what they produce
• Structure work in phases, with clear deliverables at agreed milestones, and keep technical documentation up to date
• Apply security and financial-services data practices, including POPIA, as standard

Ideal candidate

• Has built and shipped at least one production LLM system end to end
• Strong, hands-on Python and .NET (C#) experience
• Practical experience with content embedding and RAG, beyond basic prompt-and-response integration
• Experience building agentic workflows with human-in-the-loop, evals and observability
• Productive daily use of AI development tools such as Claude Code or GitHub Copilot, with the judgement to check their output
• A track record of shipping safely and at pace in a disciplined engineering environment
• Experience leading a small technical team on an AI project is an advantage
• Experience in fintech, payments or other regulated environments is an advantage