AI Engineer - REMOTE - R1.0m PA

Introduction

Ready to take your AI engineering expertise to the next level? This is an opportunity to join a technically driven team building and deploying production-grade AI and machine learning solutions not simply experimenting with the latest models.

You’ll have the opportunity to fine-tune models such as Llama, Mistral and Qwen , build self-hosted inference environments, optimise AI systems for performance and cost, and develop scalable machine learning solutions using modern cloud, containerisation and MLOps practices.

Duties & Responsibilities

What we are looking for

• 3+ years of experience building and shipping machine learning or AI-powered systems in production

• 7 plus years’ commercial development experience

• Strong Python skills, with hands-on experience using frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or similar

• Practical experience with large language models - prompting, fine-tuning, RAG, or agent frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, or custom implementations).

• Hands-on experience training and fine-tuning open-source models (e.g., Llama, Mistral, Qwen) full fine-tuning or parameter-efficient methods (LoRA/QLoRA) and deploying them on your own infrastructure rather than relying solely on hosted APIs.

• Experience standing up self-hosted inference serving on your own infra (e.g., vLLM, TGI, Triton, Ray Serve), including GPU provisioning, batching, and cost/latency optimization

• Solid understanding of ML fundamentals: model evaluation, overfitting, data leakage, and experimentation methodology

• Experience with vector databases and embedding-based retrieval (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector, FAISS)

• Comfort working with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and containerized deployments (Docker, Kubernetes), including GPU-backed compute.

• Familiarity with MLOps practices model versioning, CI/CD for ML, monitoring, and rollback strategies for both hosted and self-hosted models

• Strong software engineering fundamentals: clean code, testing, code review, and API design

• Proficiency working with AI coding assistants (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor) to accelerate development, while critically reviewing and validating AI-generated code

Nice to Have

• Experience with model quantization, distillation, or optimization techniques (e.g., GPTQ, AWQ, ONNX) for efficient self-hosted inference

• Background in NLP, computer vision, or recommendation systems.

• Experience with streaming data pipelines (Kafka, Spark) or feature stores.

• Contributions to open-source ML/AI tooling

• Prior experience in a startup or fast-growth environment

Reference Number for this position is GZ61533 which is a Permanent remote   position offering a salary of R1000k per annum , negotiable based on experience and ability.

Contact Garth on garthz@e-merge.co.za or call 011 463 3633 to discuss this and other opportunities.

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