Lead AI Engineer (Contractor)

Job Title: Lead AI Engineer Start Date: 2026-07-03 - 2026-08-02 Vacancy Type: Contractor REC000561 Sectors: Insurance, Banking, Financial Location: Gauteng , JHB - Central Salary: Brief: We are seeking a seasoned Lead AI Engineer to guide the technical direction and architecture of our multi-service ecosystem. You will be hands-on in the code, designing scalable solutions, and driving the integration of Generative AI/LLM technologies. A key aspect of this role is leveraging modern AI coding agents (such as Antigravity, Copilot, Cursor) to maximize development efficiency, establishing workflow standards for the team, and ensuring our continuous integration and deployment pipelines are robust and secure. Detail: Technical Stack & Ecosystem Backend Frameworks: Node.js (NestJS, Fastify, TypeORM, TypeScript). Frontend Stack: React, Next.js, TypeScript, TanStack Query (React Query), and TailwindCSS. Databases & Caching: PostgreSQL, Redis. Messaging & Workers: AWS SQS, event-driven background workers. Infrastructure & Cloud: AWS (ECS Fargate, ECR, CloudFront), Docker. Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Terraform. CI/CD & Pipelines: GitHub Actions (orchestrated multi-service workflows, DB migration runners, and automated rollbacks). Testing Suite: Playwright (E2E/smoke testing), Vitest/Jest (Unit testing). Third-Party Integrations: Twilio APIs, Auth0, LLM/Generative AI APIs (OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Anthropic). Core Technical Responsibilities Full-Stack Node.js Development Develop high-performance, type-safe REST APIs and microservices using Node.js, NestJS, and TypeScript. Build resilient, modern web interfaces using Next.js, React, and TanStack Query, emphasizing client-side performance and seamless server state synchronization. LLM & AI Agent Integrations Design, implement, and optimize LLM integrations (e.g., semantic search, agentic scheduling workflows, prompting pipelines, and RAG architectures). Champion and establish guidelines for using AI coding assistants and agentic IDE tools within the team to accelerate development lifecycles while maintaining high code quality. Architecture & Data Sovereignty Design and maintain multi-region data planes to comply with regional data residency regulations (e.g., GDPR and local data protection laws). Maintain clear boundaries between regional tenant data directory routers and localized operational databases. CI/CD, Infrastructure & Orchestration Own and optimize deployment pipelines in GitHub Actions. Implement robust deployment sequencing (ensuring backend migrations and services stabilize before frontend releases go live) to prevent API mismatch windows. Maintain Terraform configurations for AWS ECS Fargate, ECR, and CloudFront. Configure auto-rollback mechanisms via ECS circuit breakers and automated Playwright smoke tests. Testing & Code Quality Advocate for testing best practices across the engineering team, maintaining high coverage using Jest/Vitest and Playwright. Actively lead code reviews, enforce coding standards (e.g., type safety, linting rules), and eliminate skipped/focused test flags in CI. Must-Haves (Technical & Domain Profile): 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a solid track record in a Tech Lead or Senior Lead capacity. Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field. Domain Experience: Direct experience building and scaling scheduling/booking platforms, POS (Point of Sale) systems, and payment processing/gateways (e.g. Stripe or local regional payment solutions). Deep technical expertise in Node.js (NestJS / TypeScript) and React / Next.js. Strong hands-on experience integrating LLMs/Generative AI APIs into production web applications. High proficiency in using AI coding agents / IDE assistants to accelerate development speed and workflow automation. Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL), query optimization, and schema migrations. Direct experience writing Terraform configurations and managing workloads on AWS (ECS, Fargate, ECR, CloudFront). Experience writing GitHub Actions CI/CD workflows and automated E2E tests using Playwright. Solid understanding of multi-region deployment strategies and data residency compliance.) show more... For more information please contact: Merilyn Nontokozo Tsindwi Apply