Lead AI Engineer Job Johannesburg area,South Africa,Software Development

Technical Stack & Ecosystem

Backend Frameworks:
Node.js (NestJS, Fastify, TypeORM, Type Script).

Frontend Stack:
React, Next.js, Type Script, Tan Stack Query (React Query), and Tailwind CSS.

Databases & Caching:
PostgreSQL, Redis.

Messaging & Workers: AWS SQS, event-driven background workers.

Infrastructure & Cloud: AWS (ECS Fargate, ECR, Cloud Front), Docker.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC):
Terraform.

CI/CD & Pipelines:
Git Hub Actions (orchestrated multi-service workflows, DB migration runners, and automated rollbacks).

Testing Suite:
Playwright (E2E/smoke testing), Vitest/Jest (Unit testing).

Third-Party Integrations:
Twilio APIs, Auth0, LLM/Generative AI APIs (OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Anthropic).

Core Technical Responsibilities
Full-Stack Node.js Development

Develop high-performance, type-safe REST APIs and microservices using Node.js, NestJS, and Type Script.

Build resilient, modern web interfaces using Next.js, React, and Tan Stack Query, emphasizing client-side performance and seamless server state synchronization.

LLM & AI Agent Integrations

Design, implement, and optimize LLM integrations (e.g., semantic search, agentic scheduling workflows, prompting pipelines, and RAG architectures).

Champion and establish guidelines for using AI coding assistants and agentic IDE tools within the team to accelerate development life cycles while maintaining high code quality.

Architecture & Data Sovereignty
Design and maintain multi-region data planes to comply with regional data residency regulations (e.g., GDPR and local data protection laws).
Maintain clear boundaries between regional tenant data directory routers and localized operational databases.
CI/CD, Infrastructure & Orchestration

Own and optimize deployment pipelines in Git Hub Actions.

Implement robust deployment sequencing (ensuring backend migrations and services stabilize before frontend releases go live) to prevent API mismatch windows.

Maintain Terraform configurations for AWS ECS Fargate, ECR, and Cloud Front.

Configure auto-rollback mechanisms via ECS circuit breakers and automated Playwright smoke tests.

Testing & Code Quality

Advocate for testing best practices across the engineering team, maintaining high coverage using Jest/Vitest and Playwright.

Actively lead code reviews, enforce coding standards (e.g., type safety, linting rules), and eliminate skipped/focused test flags in CI.

Must-Haves (Technical & Domain Profile):

10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a solid track record in a Tech Lead or Senior Lead capacity.

Education:

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.

Domain

Experience:

Direct experience building and scaling scheduling/booking platforms, POS (Point of Sale) systems, and payment processing/gateways (e.g. Stripe or local regional payment solutions).

Deep technical expertise in Node.js (NestJS / Type Script) and React / Next.js.

Strong hands-on experience integrating LLMs/Generative AI APIs into production web applications.

High proficiency in using AI coding agents / IDE assistants to accelerate development speed and workflow automation.

Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL), query optimization, and schema migrations.

Direct experience writing Terraform configurations and managing workloads on AWS (ECS, Fargate, ECR, Cloud Front).

Experience writing Git Hub Actions CI/CD workflows and automated E2E tests using

Playwright.

Solid understanding of multi-region deployment strategies and data residency compliance.)