Senior AI Engineer

Want to solve real business problems with AI? As a Senior AI Engineer at Scrums.com, you'll work as a Forward Deployed Engineer, partnering with our global clients, to turn their toughest business challenges into AI solutions that deliver measurable results. You'll get to the heart of each problem, then design, build and ship the solution, working within each client's own tech stack.Why join us: Join the Scrums.com engineering team and build AI that's used in production. Our engineers and AI agents ship side by side on live systems for companies across the UK, Europe, North America, the Middle East and Africa, and you'll be one of the engineering operators who make it happen. We match you to Scrums.com projects that fit your skills, experience and ambitions, manage the whole journey, and start planning your next project before the current one ends. You get access to frontier AI models and coding agents through our secure internal platform, with licence costs covered, plus mentorship from Scrums.com leadership with quarterly career check-ins. That's a big part of why 94% of our people stay.Key detailsLocation: Johannesburg, South AfricaWork model: HybridContract: Independent contractor agreementEngagement: 12 monthsExperience: 5+ years

Responsibilities

• Partner with client leaders to understand their business, spot where AI will have the biggest impact, and agree on what success looks like.
• Shape business problems into practical AI solutions, and talk clients through the options, costs and trade-offs.
• Prototype fast to prove value early, then take the strongest ideas all the way to production.
• Build generative AI features such as AI assistants, document search that answers from a company's own files (RAG), and AI agents that complete tasks using tools.
• Connect AI models (OpenAI, Anthropic or open-source) to the client's own data, APIs and systems.
• Build the full solution, from back-end services and APIs to front-end screens, with clean, tested code.
• Test that AI output is accurate and reliable, then ship to production and track cost, quality and business impact.
• Help client teams adopt what you've built, so the value lasts after you move on.

Experience and education

What you'll need

• 5+ years building software professionally, with real code in production.
• At least one AI solution you built that real users use, such as a chatbot, RAG search or AI-powered workflow, and you can explain the business value it delivered.
• Experience working directly with business stakeholders or clients to turn their needs into working software.
• Experience building back-end services and APIs, and working on front ends.
• Experience deploying and running applications on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.
• Strong skills in at least one modern programming language (for example Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Java or C#), and the ability to get productive quickly in a client's tech stack.
• Experience calling AI model APIs and writing effective prompts.
• SQL and working with databases.

How you work

• You get to the real business problem by asking good questions before building.
• You explain technical ideas and trade-offs clearly, in plain English, to non-technical people.
• You focus on outcomes: building what makes a difference for the client.
• You're comfortable with changing priorities and unclear starting points.

Nice to have

• Previous work as a Forward Deployed Engineer, solutions engineer or technical consultant.
• Experience in banking, fintech or other large enterprises.
• AI agent frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph or LlamaIndex) and vector databases.
• Testing AI output with evaluation sets, and monitoring AI features in production.
• Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD and AI security basics.
• A degree in computer science, engineering or similar. Equivalent experience counts just as much.