Lead Software Engineer (OCR/IDP) | 6-Month Contract | Johannesburg or Cape Town at DeARX Services (Pty) Ltd

• We are on the hunt for a Lead Software Engineer with hands-on experience in OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and IDP (Intelligent Document Processing) tools to join our dynamic and forward-thinking team.
• This is a high-impact contract role for someone excited to lead from the front technically and strategically as we bring an AWS-based OCR/IDP vendor solution into our organization. You'll play a central role in shaping and extending our document automation capabilities into our AI-first strategy.

Role responsibilities:

• Lead the technical implementation of OCR/IDP solutions driving architecture, integration, and team delivery.
• Assess and evaluate third-party OCR/IDP tools and recommend the most effective vendor solutions.
• Integrate the selected vendor tools into our AWS ecosystem.
• Extend OCR/IDP capabilities into our AI roadmap, including vision models, LLMs, and intelligent automation.
• Work closely with stakeholders to ensure solutions are aligned with business needs.
• Provide technical leadership across a team of engineers, guiding development and code reviews.

Role requirements:

• 5-10 years of experience as a Lead Software Engineer/Developer.
• Strong knowledge and experience in OCR & IDP projects and tools.
• Proficiency in AWS Cloud Services including:
• EC2, ECS, Lambda
• Step Functions
• IAM & Permissions
• Proven leadership in engineering teams team lead, mentoring, or senior code review experience.

Nice-to-Have Skills:

• AWS Textract / Comprehend / A2I
• Experience with LLM-based document QA, vision models, OCR summarization, and AI-powered decision-making
• Exposure to Hugging Face and open-source vision/AI models
• Familiarity with technical evaluation frameworks for assessing OCR/IDP technologies