AI Engineer (Voice AI & IVR) – (In Office) CPT at Datafin Recruitment

ENVIRONMENT:

• Proudly positioned as South Africa’s #1 Investment company, our client is searching for dynamic and driven Senior Call Centre AI Engineer to join their growing team in Durbanville, Cape Town.  
• In this hands-on role, you'll work with technologies such as AI voice agents, Large Language Models (LLMs), predictive dialling, 3CX, SIP telephony, ElevenLabs, and CRM integrations. If you're passionate about conversational AI, automation, and building intelligent customer-facing solutions at scale, they would love to hear from you.

DUTIES: Voice AI & IVR

• Architect and build intelligent IVR and call flows on 3CX and their SIP-based predictive dialer.
• Integrate voice AI using ElevenLabs AI Agents for natural, low-latency Text-to-Speech and conversational voice.
• Integrate Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) into production voice flows.
• Design and optimise dialogue flows for naturalness, containment rate, and customer satisfaction.
• Manage voice latency, audio quality, and real-time streaming requirements in production environments.
• Continuously monitor and improve IVR containment, deflection, and completion metrics.

LLM & Virtual Agent Development

• Design and deploy LLM-powered virtual agents for both voice and digital channels (web, WhatsApp, email).
• Build robust prompt engineering frameworks and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines to ground responses in the company business knowledge.
• Leverage and adapt LLMs (Claude, GPT, Gemini, Llama) and orchestrate them with Claude Code, n8n, Zapier, and Base44.
• Implement guardrails, fallback logic, and escalation paths to ensure safe, accurate, and on-brand AI interactions.
• Evaluate and benchmark LLM performance using domain-specific metrics (CSAT, containment, accuracy, hallucination rate).

Call Centre Platform & CRM Integration

• Integrate AI solutions with 3CX and the SIP predictive dialer for inbound and outbound campaigns.
• Build and maintain SIP trunk configurations, and WebRTC integrations where applicable.
• Ensure high availability, fault tolerance, and graceful degradation of all customer-facing AI systems.

Analytics & QA Automation

• Develop NLP models for intent classification, sentiment analysis, topic detection, and agent performance scoring.
• Implement automated QA workflows (n8n, Zapier) that flag compliance risks, escalation triggers, and coaching opportunities.
• Use data-driven insights to continuously improve dialogue design, model accuracy, and operational workflows.

Leadership & Architecture

• Lead technical design reviews and provide architectural guidance on AI and voice system decisions.
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to the team's technical growth and best practices.
• Collaborate with product, operations, and CX teams to align AI capabilities with business goals.
• Drive vendor evaluation and selection for AI, telephony, and contact centre tooling.

REQUIREMENTS:

• 5+ years of software or AI engineering experience, with at least 2 years focused on conversational AI or contact centre technology.
• Proven track record of designing and deploying voice AI or chatbot systems in production at scale.
• Hands-on experience with voice/telephony — 3CX, SIP predictive dialling, and voice AI such as ElevenLabs.
• Strong understanding of LLM architectures, prompt engineering, RAG patterns, and LLM evaluation methodologies.
• Experience integrating AI systems with enterprise platforms via REST APIs, webhooks, and event-driven messaging.
• Solid grasp of telephony protocols (SIP, RTP, WebRTC) and voice network fundamentals.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience with 3CX administration and SIP predictive dialer configuration.
• Hands-on experience with ElevenLabs (or similar) voice AI agents in production.
• Knowledge of CRM.