Senior Applied AI Engineer – Prompting & Evaluation

Overview

Permanent full‑time senior engineering role in Johannesburg, South Africa. Klipboard is a global provider of integrated trading and business management solutions. The position focuses on leading AI engineering and prompt‑engineering practices across the organisation while promoting a hybrid work model of 3 days in‑office and 2 days remote.

• Create, refine, and maintain prompts, context strategies, and agentic workflows that power AI features in Klipboard products.
• Develop evaluation harnesses and automated test suites to rigorously measure AI output quality at scale.
• Coach, mentor, and partner with hundreds of engineers across multiple sites, building communities of practice and shared assets.
• Set and uphold standards for prompting, evaluation, and context engineering, updating them as tools and models evolve.
• Ship measurable AI features and workflows, ensuring they meet safety, accuracy, and data‑handling standards.
• Collaborate with product teams and subject‑matter experts to translate business problems into high‑quality prompts.
• Represent Klipboard’s AI engineering practice externally through talks, writing, or open‑source contributions when appropriate.

• Strong software engineering background with several years of production software delivery.
• Substantial hands‑on experience with large language models, including prompt design, context engineering, and structured outputs.
• Experience building evaluation harnesses or test suites for LLM outputs and using them to improve quality.
• Demonstrated ability to grow other engineers via mentoring, teaching, training, or community building.
• Daily fluency with AI coding tools such as Git Hub Copilot or Cursor and a practical understanding of their benefits and limitations.

• Experience with retrieval‑augmented generation, agentic workflows, or fine‑tuning in production.
• Proficiency with LLM APIs, orchestration frameworks, vector search, embeddings, retrieval pipelines, and evaluation datasets.
• Familiarity with multiple model providers and an awareness of their differing strengths.
• Domain exposure to distribution, rental, retail, automotive aftermarket, or garage‑management sectors.
• Experience helping legacy or green‑field teams adopt AI tooling.
• Public sharing of work, such as talks or open‑source contributions.

• Some travel between the UK and South Africa offices for coaching and community building.
• Will keep standards current as models, tools, and providers evolve rapidly.

We value and respect the diversity of our workforce and are committed to creating an inclusive workplace where diversity, equity, and inclusion are integral to our culture.