{"id":1895923,"url":"https://alion.io/job/dvt-principal-java-engineer-ai-augmentation-and-engineering-systems","title":"Principal Java Engineer: AI Augmentation and Engineering Systems","company":{"id":57384,"name":"DVT","domain":"dvt.co.za","url":"https://alion.io/company/dvt","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"services","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Recruitee","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":94,"open_postings":4,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.25,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":57,"computed_at":"2026-10-12T06:55:09Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Cape Town, South Africa"],"countries":["ZA"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":38000,"max_usd":111000,"period":"year","method":"global_role_cell_scaled_by_country","sample_n":1790},"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":".NET","optional":false},{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Context Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Evaluation","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Tool Use","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":true},{"name":"C#","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-02T12:42:56Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-02","last_verified_at":"2026-10-12T16:24:58Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":10,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":10},"description":"DVT is looking for an exceptional Principal Engineer to lead the technical implementation of AI augmented software engineering across a large and complex engineering environment.\nThis is a senior individual contributor position, equivalent in influence to a Head of Engineering, but without direct line management responsibility. The successful candidate will remain deeply hands on, writing production code, building engineering tooling and setting technical standards across multiple development teams and technology stacks.\nThe role will be responsible for designing and implementing the engineering foundations required for safe, measurable and repeatable AI assisted software delivery. This includes agent scaffolding, retrieval and context layers, prompt and workflow libraries, evaluation frameworks, guardrails, developer tooling and engineering telemetry.\nRequirements\nKey Responsibilities\nDesign and build platforms supporting AI assisted software development\n\nDevelop agentic workflows, retrieval solutions, context layers and evaluation frameworks\n\nIntegrate AI capabilities into developer tooling and CI/CD pipelines\n\nEstablish guardrails and engineering standards for AI generated code\n\nCreate integration patterns across Java, .NET, React and Flutter environments\n\nBuild telemetry to measure delivery, quality, defects and productivity\n\nEvaluate AI models, platforms, tools and third party services\n\nLead technical reviews, prototypes and architecture discussions\n\nMentor senior engineers and influence technical direction across multiple teams\n\nEnsure solutions meet security, regulatory and data protection requirements\n\nTechnical Requirements\n10 or more years of software engineering experience\n\nProven hands on delivery at senior, staff or principal level\n\nDeep production experience in at least two of the following:\nJava, .NET, React, Flutter\n\nWorking knowledge of the remaining technology stacks\n\nStrong AWS and cloud native architecture experience\n\nExperience with microservices, event driven systems, APIs and CI/CD\n\nExperience building internal platforms or developer tooling used across multiple teams\n\nAI Engineering Requirements\nPractical experience building and shipping AI enabled engineering solutions\n\nLarge language model application patterns\n\nAgentic workflows and tool use\n\nRetrieval augmented generation and context engineering\n\nPrompt and workflow design\n\nModel evaluation and benchmarking\n\nEvaluation harnesses, regression testing and guardrails\n\nUnderstanding of generative AI security, safety and production failure modes\n\nAdvisory or strategy experience without practical implementation will not be sufficient.\n\nLeadership Requirements\nProven technical leadership across multiple teams\n\nAbility to influence without direct authority\n\nStrong mentoring and engineering enablement skills\n\nAbility to communicate technical decisions to technical and business stakeholders\n\nConfidence to defend technical decisions under commercial pressure\n\nQualifications\nBachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Engineering or a related field.\n\nIdeal Candidate Profile\nThe ideal candidate is a deeply technical Principal Engineer who combines strong software engineering fundamentals with practical AI engineering experience.\nYou should be comfortable writing production code, building platforms for other engineers, working across different technology stacks and influencing technical direction at organisational level.\nYou will be expected to solve problems where no established implementation pattern exists and where decisions carry significant operational, security and regulatory consequences.\nThis role is best suited to someone who wants broad technical influence while continuing to build, prototype, test and ship working software.\n** Principal Engineer role is positioned as a senior individual contributor at Head of Engineering equivalence.\nThe role carries no headcount, budget authority or line management responsibility.\nIts seniority derives from its technical influence across the engineering environment and its accountability for delivering the technical foundation of the organisation’s transformation.\nWho we are:","description_format":"text","description_chars":4189,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":10,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["IT Consulting & Digital Transformation","Software 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