Principal Engineer – Generative AI & Copilot Systems

Purpose of the role

We’re looking for a hands on technical leader to drive the vision, design, and delivery of Generative AI powered microapps, co pilots, and decision-assist tools across our operations in South Africa and the Philippines. You’ll lead a small, high-performing pod, write production-grade code, and play a pivotal role in shaping our GenAI strategy and execution within a regulated financial services environment.

Technical Delivery

Build high-impact GenAI features hands-on: prompt engineering, prototyping, LLM integrations, and MLOps lite pipelines.
Lead development and deployment of copilots and decision assistants in live business environments.

Team Leadership & Mentoring

Mentor and coach 3–5 engineers through pair programming, career development, and best practices.
Drive code quality through design reviews, secure coding standards, and test-driven development

Risk & Compliance

Classify GenAI use cases into risk tiers and define guardrails accordingly.
Design mitigation plans covering hallucination, bias, privacy, latency, and model selection.

Architecture & Governance

Chair design sessions within the squad and contribute to the AI Technical Committee.
Review solution designs and shape reusable reference architectures

Monitoring & Continuous Improvement

Define and track SLOs for latency, cost, and model performance.
Instrument observability, telemetry, and automated alerting pipelines.

Stakeholder Collaboration

Work closely with Product Owners, Risk, Ops, and Compliance teams.

Demo new capabilities, refine requirements, and document repeatable patterns in internal wikis

Minimum Qualifications & Experience:

• 4+ years in software or ML engineering, or equivalent demonstrable impact.
• 1+ years building production-grade GenAI/LLM solutions with safety mitigations.
• Experience implementing evaluation frameworks: RAG metrics, hallucination tests, toxicity & bias checks.
• Solid experience mentoring, conducting code reviews, and setting engineering direction.
• Production-level skills in Python and at least one major GenAI SDK (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Hugging Face).
• Proficiency with vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS) in RAG architectures.
• Familiar with full-stack engineering (React/JS/HTML), REST/gRPC APIs, Git, Docker

 

 

Nice to Have:

Experience with AI-first tools like Cursor, Lovable, Agenta, LangSmith, or Bento.
Shipped a production copilot or autonomous/semi-autonomous AI agent.
Exposure to regulated domains (fintech, banking, healthcare).
Familiarity with orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex).
Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and CI/CD pipelines.
Participation in internal committees, standards bodies, or open-source governance.

Why Join Us?

Shape the GenAI strategy in a leading financial services organization.
Work on meaningful, high-impact AI applications at scale.
Lead a tight-knit team of innovators and engineers.
Competitive compensation, flexible work, and a focus on continuous learning.