AI Engineers; Pro-Code Junior​/Mid and Senior

AI Engineers (Pro-Code) Junior/Mid and Senior

Badger SA, George, Western Cape

We build AI that gives customers a soft landing and gives teams their time back. At Badger, AI isn’t a side project – it’s how we scale engagement, service, and internal execution. We’re hiring pro-code AI Engineers to architect and ship production-grade agents and conversational systems – RAG-based and deeply integrated with our CRM, portals, and messaging channels. If you can turn powerful models into simple, reliable experiences (fast, accurate, on‑brand, and governed), you’ll fit here.

• Architect, build, and run conversational agents and automated workflows that deliver measurable efficiency (time saved, faster resolution, lower cost-to-serve).
• Turn model capability into product-grade behaviour: fast, accurate, resilient, and easy to operate.

• Connect AI systems to messaging channels (e.g., Whats App, Microsoft) and orchestrate across our CRM and self-service portals.
• Design clean integration patterns (APIs, events, connectors) so data flows reliably end-to-end.

• Use telemetry, tracing, and Dev Ops practices to monitor performance, troubleshoot issues, and iterate quickly.
• Improve speed, stability, and quality continuously – without breaking trust.

• Work with business leaders to shape AI features and prioritise what matters.
• Explain complex behaviour and data insights in plain language. Make tradeoffs explicit.

• Build with privacy and ethics as defaults: POPIA/GDPR.
• Treat governance as a design constraint, not paperwork.

• Maintain clean version control, documentation, and runbooks.
• Host deep dives and mentorship to raise the technical bar across the team.

• Strong Python and real experience shipping with frameworks/APIs such as Azure OpenAI, OpenAI API, Lang Chain, Microsoft agent frameworks, or similar.
• Hands‑on experience with Azure AI Foundry (deployment, experimentation, evaluation; fine‑tuning where relevant).
• Proven work building RAG / knowledge-grounded systems (retrieval strategy, chunking, embeddings, reranking, evaluation) using vector databases.
• Solid backend fundamentals: APIs, integrations, auth, and validation/debugging using tools like VS Code and Postman.
• Engineering discipline: modular design, testing, and CI/CD for scalable, production-grade delivery.

• Integrity:
  You tell the truth, you fix issues, you don’t ship for the sake of shipping.
• Curiosity:
  You keep learning, and you enjoy solving hard operational problems.
• Collaboration:
  
  You bring people with you, no heroics, no silos.
• Resilience:
  You stay calm when production gets tough.
• Customer-first:
  Every solution should make life easier and create a real soft landing.

• Minimum:
  Matric and 6–10+ years engineering with ownership of architecture, reliability, and delivery outcomes.
• Preferred:
  Degree/diploma + Azure AI Foundry exposure.

• Minimum:
  Matric and 3–5 years software engineering (Python-heavy), including production APIs/integrations.
• Preferred:
  Degree/diploma + cloud exposure (Azure) + some CI/CD.

• Minimum:
  Matric + proof of coding competence (portfolio) in Python + basic API work.
• Preferred:
  Diploma/Degree (CS/Eng/Maths/Stats/Data Science) or intensive software bootcamp + strong portfolio.

• MLOps / runtime:
  Docker, containerised deployments, automated lifecycle management.
• Familiarity with the Microsoft automation ecosystem (Power Automate, Copilot Studio) and CRM integrations (e.g., Hub Spot/Salesforce).
• Exposure to call-centre integration patterns (e.g., Connex
  
  AI) and real-time routing/agent assist environments.

We’re hiring an engineer who can turn models into reliable systems: deeply integrated, observable, secure, and genuinely useful. Not demos. Not science projects. Production. If you want to engineer AI systems that power a real business, not just run notebooks, this is your build site.

Show us what you’ve deployed.

Let’s build.