Technical Lead: AI personalisation

Overview

Let's Write Africa's Story Together! Old Mutual is a firm believer in the African opportunity and our diverse talent reflects this.

Job Description

We are looking for an experienced and driven Technical Lead to join our AI personalisation team within the Old Mutual Group. This team is at the forefront of building intelligent, AI-powered products including conversational chatbots, LLM-driven solutions, and data analytics platforms while also maintaining and evolving robust Java Spring Boot backend services.

The Technical Lead will be responsible for driving technical direction, mentoring engineers, and delivering high-quality, scalable AI and data products in a cloud-native AWS environment — while remaining deeply involved in day-to-day development.

Team: AI Personalisation | Group Technology & Transformation

Location:

Johannesburg | Cape Town | Durban

Note:

This is a hands-on technical role. The split is approximately 60% individual technical contribution (active development, coding, architecture implementation) and 40% technical leadership (mentoring, planning, governance, and stakeholder engagement).

• Lead the end-to-end design, architecture, and delivery of AI products including chatbots, LLM integrations, and analytics platforms.
• Define and uphold technical standards, coding practices, and architectural patterns across the team.
• Provide hands-on technical guidance and mentorship to a cross-functional team of engineers and data practitioners.
• Drive technical discovery, proof-of-concept initiatives, and technology evaluations for emerging AI capabilities.
• Collaborate closely with Product Owners, Data Architects, and AI Personalisation leads to align delivery with business objectives.

• Architect and deliver LLM-based products — including RAG pipelines, prompt engineering, knowledge-base retrieval, and dynamic conversational agents.
• Design and implement ETL/ELT pipelines for ingesting, transforming, and serving structured and unstructured data.
• Develop and maintain Python-based data processing scripts, ML model wrappers, and AI orchestration layers.
• Ensure data quality, observability, and governance across all analytics and AI data flows.
• Work with SQL and data warehousing solutions to support reporting, analytics, and model feature engineering.

• Design and build scalable Java Spring Boot microservices to support AI product APIs and backend business logic.
• Manage API lifecycle and integration patterns using Gravitee API Gateway, including rate limiting, security policies, and developer portal management.
• Implement secure, performant RESTful APIs for consumption by frontend teams, chatbot engines, and third-party integrations.

• Design and enforce API security architecture standards across all services, including:
• Authentication & Authorisation: OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect (OIDC), JWT token validation, and API key management.
• Session Management:
  Secure token lifecycle management, refresh token rotation, session expiry policies, and stateless session design patterns.
• Zero Trust Principles:
  Enforce least-privilege access, mutual TLS (mTLS), and service-to-service authentication across microservices.
• Threat Mitigation:
  Implement protections against OWASP API Top 10 vulnerabilities including injection attacks, broken object-level authorisation (BOLA), and excessive data exposure.
• Rate Limiting & Throttling:
  Define and enforce API usage policies through Gravitee and AWS API Gateway to prevent abuse and ensure fair usage.
• Transport Security:
  Mandate TLS 1.2+ across all API surfaces, manage certificates via AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), and enforce HTTPS-only policies.
• Secrets Management:
  Enforce the use of AWS Secrets Manager and AWS Parameter Store for all credentials, API keys, and sensitive configuration — no hardcoded secrets.

• Architect and manage cloud infrastructure on AWS, ensuring scalability, security, and cost efficiency.
• Oversee containerised workload deployment using Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate.
• Design and manage network topology including VPCs, subnets, security groups, NACLs, and VPC peering/transit gateways.
• Co…