Lead AI Engineer

Job Description

• A leading South African packaging manufacturer that specializes in producing corrugated packaging and Single Face Kraft SFK products is seeking a Lead AI Engineer who will be the technical owner of an internally built agentic system that currently runs the company's planning cycle end-to-end.

Responsibilities

• Production Governance: Own existing agentic MRP/planning systems; establish source control, managed environments, clear documentation, and formal deployment pipelines.
• Risk & Fallback Management: Eliminate single points of failure technical and operational. Maintain tested rollbacks, kill-switches, and documented manual fallback plans.
• Bounded Autonomy & Safety: Program hard limits on agent scope/financial values, enforce human-in-the-loop approval gates for irreversible actions, and ensure loud failures over silent errors.
• Eval Harnesses: Build and run historical evaluation test suites against all prompt, code, or model updates prior to deployment.
• Staged Releases: Enforce a strict rollout pathway Shadow Running $ ightarrow$ Pilot $ ightarrow$ Canary $ ightarrow$ Earned Autonomy.
• Observability & Auditing: Implement complete telemetry inputs, reasoning logs, actions and queryable audit trails that satisfy financial and governance standards.
• Process Discovery: Engage directly with factory floor and business operations to understand actual workflows before designing automation.
• End-to-End Delivery: Scope, architect, and build scalable systems across planning, logistics, procurement, and finance—recommending "go/no-go" based on pilot metrics.
• Commercial Controls: Ensure financial actions adhere to CFO/external audit requirements segregation of duties, approval limits.
• Tooling & AI-Assisted Dev: Leverage modern AI dev tools e.g., Cursor, Claude Code as primary workflows with rigorous code review and testing standards.
• Vendor & Cost Management: Direct model selection, transaction cost optimization, data residency, and vendor lock-in prevention.
• Enablement & Reporting: Provide runbooks and training for business users; report directly to executive leadership on progress, risk, and technical debt.

Minimum Requirements

• Production Release Discipline: Proven track record of owning commercial software running in live production including staging, canary rollouts, incident handling, and rollbacks. Prototypes or internal tools only will not be shortlisted.
• End-to-End System Shipping: Demonstrable history of delivering full-lifecycle software solutions, including error handling, monitoring, and handover.
• Engineering Background: Minimum 8+ years in software engineering, with 3+ years in a Senior, Lead, or Principal role. Strong software engineering fundamentals take precedence over pure ML research.
• AI-Assisted Workflows: High fluency with AI-assisted development tools Cursor, Claude Code, or equivalent, assessed via live practical evaluation.

Desirable Experience

• Practical experience building with LLMs and agentic workflows prompt engineering, tool use, evaluation frameworks, handling non-determinism.
• Familiarity with ERP, MRP, or manufacturing supply chain environments.
• Willingness to master corrugated packaging and manufacturing process nuances.