Senior AI Engineer Job Sandton area,South Africa,Software Development

Join a pioneering team within a leading South African financial services institution that values innovation, collaboration, and continuous growth. As a Senior AI Engineer, you will become a vital part of a mission-critical platform environment, working alongside top-tier engineers in a culture that fosters curiosity and technological excellence.

This role offers a unique opportunity to leverage your expertise in AI, distributed systems, and Java development within a dynamic, modern infrastructure environment, including streaming data and AI-driven developer tools.

Duties:

Design and develop Java‑based platform services and microservices.
Build self‑service portals, APIs, and automation tools for Kafka platform users.
Develop AI‑powered assistants and automation to enhance developer productivity and platform operations.
Create tools that simplify onboarding, provisioning, and lifecycle management of Kafka resources.
Implement governance, standards, and policy enforcement across the platform.
Develop integrations with enterprise identity, security, and CI/CD tooling.
Improve platform observability, monitoring, and operational automation.
Troubleshoot complex distributed systems and resolve production issues.
Collaborate with infrastructure, security, architecture, and application teams to enhance the overall developer experience.

Requirements:

At least 3+ years of Java development experience.
Strong knowledge of Java frameworks such as Spring Boot or Quarkus.
Experience building REST APIs.
Good understanding of distributed systems.
Experience with Apache Kafka or similar messaging technologies.
Proficiency in Java, development, PostgreSQL, Git, and Docker.

Nice to Have:

Familiarity with AI/machine learning frameworks.
Experience with platform automation and developer tooling.

Benefits:

Competitive salary ranging from R700,000 to R1,200,000 per year (Cost to Company), negotiable.
Hybrid work environment.
Opportunity to work on innovative, large-scale banking systems.
Collaborate within a culture that values curiosity and continuous improvement.