AI/ ML Engineer (George Western Cape, On-site) at Badger Holdings (Pty) Ltd

What You’ll Do

You’ll design, build, and operationalise AI across the business:

• Define and implement an AI governance framework (approval, testing, monitoring, lifecycle management)
• Integrate Azure OpenAI / OpenAI APIs with proper guardrails (PII handling, audit logging, content filtering)
• Build and scale AI pipelines for claims processing (OCR, classification, entity extraction, validation)
• Establish prompt engineering standards and reusable prompt libraries
• Create evaluation frameworks to measure accuracy, latency, and cost
• Implement responsible AI practices aligned to regulatory requirements
• Optimise AI cost efficiency (token usage, caching, model selection)
• Support and enhance Contact Centre Copilot solutions
• Roll out and manage GitHub Copilot across engineering teams
• Monitor model performance in production and proactively manage drift
• Engineering Contribution (Non-Negotiable)
• Write and maintain production-grade Python code for ML pipelines
• Contribute to platform engineering and integration efforts
• Collaborate on API development and system integration
• Participate in code reviews, testing, and engineering standards
• Support modernisation of legacy systems where AI integrates into core workflows

What You Bring

• 5+ years in software engineering, with 2+ years focused on AI/ML
• Proven experience deploying and maintaining AI/ML in production
• Hands-on experience with Azure OpenAI or OpenAI APIs
• Strong Python skills for building and maintaining ML pipelines
• Experience with document AI (OCR, NER, classification, form recognition)
• Understanding of LLM patterns (RAG, fine-tuning, embeddings, prompt engineering)
• Familiarity with vector databases and semantic search
• Strong engineering discipline: testing, monitoring, documentation, code quality

Education

• Degree or Diploma in Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, or a related technical field

Advantageous:

• Certifications in AI, machine learning, or cloud platforms (Azure preferred)
• Equivalent practical experience building real-world AI systems in production will be considered.