Senior Ai Engineer

SENIOR AI ENGINEER

Location: Cape Town or Johannesburg, South Africa

Media
24 is South Africa’s leading media and technology company, reaching millions of people daily across our diverse portfolio of digital platforms, news brands, and content channels. We’re at the forefront of digital transformation in the media industry, leveraging cutting‑edge AI and machine learning technologies to personalise experiences and accelerate content creation across all our brands.

We are seeking an innovative and experienced Senior AI Engineer to join our growing AI team and help scale artificial intelligence across Media
24’s diverse portfolio of digital platforms and news brands. In this role, you will be instrumental in implementing production‑ready AI solutions that enhance personalisation, accelerate newsroom productivity, and improve user experiences across all our channels and brands.

As a Senior AI Engineer, you will work on challenging problems ranging from content recommendation systems and personalisation engines to AI‑powered newsroom tools and automated content workflows. You’ll collaborate with cross‑functional teams including product managers, data scientists, engineers, and editorial teams to deliver AI solutions that directly impact millions of users.

• Design, develop and deploy scalable AI/ML systems and pipelines using cloud infrastructure (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure)
• Build and maintain production‑grade machine learning models for content recommendation, personalisation and newsroom automation
• Implement MLOps practices including model versioning, automated testing, monitoring and continuous deployment
• Optimise AI model performance, latency and resource utilisation for high‑traffic production environments

• Develop and enhance personalisation algorithms that deliver relevant content experiences across web, mobile and emerging platforms
• Build content classification, semantic analysis and recommendation systems using NLP and deep learning techniques
• Implement real‑time content processing pipelines for automated tagging, categorisation and content matching
• Create user profiling and behavioural analysis systems to improve content targeting and engagement

• Collaborate with editorial teams to develop AI‑powered tools that accelerate content creation and curation
• Build automated content workflows including article summarisation, fact‑checking assistance and content optimisation
• Implement AI solutions for news aggregation, content deduplication and trend analysis
• Develop tools for automated social media content generation and distribution optimisation

• Write clean, maintainable and well‑documented Python code following software engineering best practices
• Design and implement APIs and microservices for AI model serving and integration
• Conduct experiments with cutting‑edge AI technologies including large language models (LLMs), transformer architectures and generative AI
• Stay current with AI/ML research and evaluate new technologies for potential implementation

• Work closely with product teams to translate business requirements into technical AI solutions
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to knowledge sharing within the AI community at Media
  24
• Participate in code reviews, technical discussions and architectural planning sessions
• Collaborate with data scientists to product ionise research models and prototypes

• Honour’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science, or related technical field
• Minimum 5+ years of software engineering experience with at least 3 years focused on AI/ML development
• Strong proficiency in Python and experience with ML frameworks (Tensor Flow, PyTorch, scikit‑learn)
• Hands‑on experience with cloud platforms (AWS Sage Maker, Google AI Platform, Azure ML) and containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Proven experience building and deploying production ML systems at scale

• Deep understanding of machine learning…