Lead AI Engineer

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 $rightarrow$Pilot $rightarrow$Canary $rightarrow$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.

Benefits:

Competitive salary based on experience (salary can potentially be more based on experience/skills)

IF you meet the above requirements and want to make a career-changing move, apply today by emailing your CV to [email protected]