Senior AI Platform Engineer; Cloud

Empowering Africa’s tomorrow, together…one story at a time. With over 100 years of rich history and strongly positioned as a local bank with regional and international expertise, a career with our family offers the opportunity to be part of this exciting growth journey, to reset our future and shape our destiny as a proudly African group.

Belonging at Absa Absa is committed to creating an inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive. We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome applications from suitably qualified individuals from diverse backgrounds. In support of our Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB) commitments and Employment Equity objectives, preference may be given to candidates from underrepresented designated groups, including persons with disabilities. We encourage applicants who may require reasonable accommodation during the recruitment process to let us know so that appropriate support can be provided.

Absa Group’s Chief Data Analytics and Applied AI Office (CDAIO) requires a technically exceptional and commercially grounded AI Platform Engineer (Cloud) to design, build, operate, and continuously optimise the multi-cloud AI infrastructure that powers the bank's enterprise AI capability. The AI capability must enable the CDAIO to fulfil its mandate as steward of the bank’s AI capabilities through the end-to‑end delivery of the AI platform enablement, governance and acceptable use in service of the bank’s strategic and commercial objectives.

This role is the engineering backbone of a platform that supports various live AI projects across four business units (CIB, PPB, BB, and AR) and ten countries. This role demands deep technical mastery in cloud AI infrastructure, AI Fin Ops, zero-trust security architecture, agentic AI infrastructure, and platform observability, combined with the commercial fluency to govern AI compute costs at enterprise scale and communicate trade-offs to senior business and finance stakeholders.

The role includes but not limited to applying critical thinking, design thinking, and problem-solving skills in an agile team environment to solve complex platform engineering challenges, delivering high-quality solutions at optimal cost to serve, in full compliance with Absa's Enterprise‑Wide Risk Management Framework, Group Architecture standards, and AI Responsible Use Policy. The successful candidate carries full accountability for building high‑performing, scalable, enterprise‑grade Platform services.

As well as build capability in others to do the same. Job Description

• AI Platform Engineering and Architecture:
  Design and operation of enterprise‑grade, multi‑cloud AI platform infrastructure supporting bank‑wide AI delivery at scale across the AI platform stack (AWS Bedrock, Databricks AI, Microsoft Azure AI Foundry, Hugging Face, and GPU clusters).
• AI Fin Ops and Compute Cost Governance:
  Full accountability for AI compute cost models, chargeback and showback frameworks, provisioned throughput optimisation, and monthly cost‑per‑use‑case reporting to Group Finance across all four business units.
• Platform Observability and SLA Engineering: AI‑specific service reliability standards, observability tooling, and incident management for production AI workloads serving 43 live projects across ten countries.
• AI Security Architecture and Zero Trust:
  Zero‑trust security design, OAuth / OIDC integration, prompt injection controls, and data residency compliance protecting Absa's AI platform across the different country jurisdictions.
• Agentic AI Infrastructure:
  Design and operation of the infrastructure layer enabling multi‑agent AI systems, autonomous workflows, tool‑calling architectures, and agent orchestration at…