Principal Artificial Intelligence Engineer

Principal Artificial Intelligence Engineer

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The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is a leading scientific and technology research organisation that researches, develops, localises and diffuses technologies to accelerate socio-economic prosperity in South Africa. The organisation’s work contributes to industrial development and supports a capable state.

The CSIR has a vacancy for a Principal Artificial Intelligence Engineer in the Emerging Digital Technologies for Fourth Industrial Revolution (EDT4IR) Research Centre within the Next Generation Enterprises and Institutions Cluster. The incumbent will be responsible for designing, developing and implementing Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems architecture and solutions. This position is based in Pretoria and will report to the Research Group Leader.

For more information about the cluster, please visit

• Provide leadership in the provision of technical solutions to client programmes;
• Propose and/or contribute to the strategic investment plan and implement Parliamentary Grant, Contract Research and Development and other grant‑funded projects;
• Research, develop and test innovative solutions in AI and remain well‑versed in new approaches in tools, methods or technologies in the evolving AI space;
• Supervise/mentor junior staff in the area(s) of expertise;
• Generate and lead science engineering and technology (SET) activity outputs e.g. reports, guidelines, system requirements, peer‑reviewed publications, and technology and software packages;
• Understand and interpret client requirements by contributing to user requirement analysis and/or well‑articulated proposals;
• Participate in external task teams or committees in relevant domains;
• Provide technical support on business development and participate in client interactions;
• Manage projects through planning of appropriate processes and policies to ensure Intellectual Property (IP) protection and technology transfer;
• Advance theoretical AI approaches to deployable solutions, i.e. implemented and deployed into large‑scale production systems.
• Develop technology demonstrators to contribute to an increase in new localised technologies.

• An Honours degree in computer science/engineering, electrical/electronic engineering, information technology or related fields with at least seven years’ experience in artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) and software development in artificial intelligence technologies;
• A Master’s degree will be advantageous;
• Experience in the following is required:
  • Applied machine‑learning with regression, classification, etc. models for supervised learning;
  • Computer vision tasks;
  • Natural language processing and understanding;
  • Building multimodal models;
  • Unstructured data;
  • Big‑data unsupervised learning;
  • Data platform engineering;
  • Proficiency and experience building AI models with a deep learning framework such as Tensor Flow, Keras or Theano;
  • Ability to select hardware (and relevant production/deployment knowledge) to run an ML model with the required latency.
• Business Development and financial acumen;
• Ability to construct scopes and proposals for potential clients.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills;
• Exposure to Project Management;
  • Technical lead for complex projects involving multiple stakeholders.
• Understanding of transforming/implementing software/algorithms for use in real‑life systems would be advantageous;
• Conflict management skills will be advantageous;
• Knowledge of programming in modern object‑orientated languages, with Open‑Source development tools and platforms;
• Ability to apply resource management techniques to run an ML model with the required latency;
• Demonstrated experience in bringing theoretical machine‑learning approaches illustrated in academic research papers to actual implementations, i.e. implemented and deployed into large‑scale production systems.
• Cloud‑based platforms: AWS, IBM Cloud, Azure;
• Ability to demonstrate Object‑oriented software engineering skills;
• Strong quantitative skills (mathematics/statistics/computer science);
• Demonstrated ability to…