AI Engineer at Cape Union Mart

About the Role

• The AI Engineer will form part of the BI team while delivering AI capability across the wider business.
• This is a hybrid role combining hands-on technical engineering with meaningful cross-functional engagement. The successful candidate will identify, prioritise, design, and deliver AI-driven solutions that create measurable value across multiple business units.
• The role is not limited to the BI team’s existing backlog and is not a purely technical development position. Success will depend equally on strong engineering capability and the ability to work directly with non-technical stakeholders, understand business challenges, and translate those challenges into practical, scalable solutions.
• The AI Engineer will be expected to proactively identify opportunities, establish trusted relationships across the organisation, and help the business adopt AI responsibly and effectively.

Key Responsibilities:

AI Engineering and Technical Delivery

• Design, build, deploy, and maintain production-ready AI solutions, including:
• Large language model applications
• Retrieval-augmented generation pipelines
• Intelligent agents and workflow automation
• Predictive and machine learning models
• Build AI solutions on top of the organisation’s Oracle Analytics Cloud and data warehouse platform.
• Extend existing BI and reporting capabilities through:
• Natural language querying
• Automated insight generation
• Anomaly and exception detection
• AI-assisted analysis and decision support
• Ensure that AI outputs are grounded in accurate, governed, and trusted business data.
• Integrate AI solutions into existing data pipelines, BI tools, and operational processes.
• Monitor and maintain deployed solutions to ensure reliability, quality, security, and ongoing business relevance.

Cross-Functional Engagement

• Act as a primary point of contact for AI opportunities and use cases across the business.
• Engage directly with stakeholders in areas such as Planning, Merchandising, Supply Chain, Finance, and other business units.
• Facilitate discovery discussions to understand business problems, current processes, data requirements, and desired outcomes.
• Explain AI capabilities, limitations, risks, and outcomes in clear, non-technical language.
• Partner proactively with business unit leaders to identify quick wins and valuable use cases rather than relying only on incoming requests.

AI Strategy, Standards, and Governance

• Contribute to a practical and proportionate AI governance approach.
• Promote the responsible use of AI and ensure that solutions align with organisational data and technology standards.
• Provide concise updates to BI leadership and executive sponsors.
• Contribute to the organisation’s broader AI roadmap by identifying recurring needs, reusable capabilities, and opportunities for scale.

Experience and Capabilities:

Technical Requirements

The successful candidate should have:

• Strong practical experience in AI or machine learning engineering.
• Demonstrated experience working with:
• Large language models
• Retrieval-augmented generation
• Agent or orchestration frameworks
• APIs and systems integration
• Cloud-based AI tooling
• Experience developing solutions that move beyond proof of concept into reliable business or production use.
• Experience working with enterprise data platforms and data warehouses.
• A strong understanding of data quality, governance, security, testing, and monitoring as they relate to AI solutions.

Business Engagement Requirements

The successful candidate should demonstrate:

• The ability to engage confidently with non-technical stakeholders.
• A structured approach to turning broad business challenges into clear requirements and deliverable solutions.
• Strong communication, facilitation, and presentation skills.
• A proactive and consultative working style.
• A strong focus on adoption and measurable outcomes, not only technical completion.

Advantageous Experience:

The following would be beneficial:

• Retail industry experience.
• Experience establishing an intake, prioritisation, or governance process for AI initiatives.
• Experience helping an organisation move AI solutions from experimentation into repeatable, governed delivery.

Personal Attributes

The ideal candidate will be:

• Curious and commercially minded.
• Comfortable working with ambiguity.
• Pragmatic and delivery focused.
• Collaborative, credible, and confident with stakeholders at different organisational levels.
• Comfortable taking ownership of an initiative from discovery through delivery and adoption.