About the company
Our client is a well-established South African fintech in the payments space, modernising its platforms with AI.

About the role
We’re looking for a Senior Developer to lead the design and delivery of the systems behind a high-volume digital payments platform. You’ll build AI into the product and into how the team delivers, lead the move of existing systems onto modern AI-native services, and set the standard for disciplined use of AI tools across the team. This is a hands-on engineering role focused on building and modernising software with AI. It does not involve designing autonomous, long-running agent workflows.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the design and delivery of software with cross-functional teams, turning business problems into sound technical approaches
• Lead the replatforming of live systems onto AI-native services, defining the migration approach, sequencing and risk controls so current platforms stay stable and secure
• Design and build LLM-integrated features beyond simple request and response, including context engineering, embeddings and RAG
• Own the data layer behind AI features, including embeddings and vector search alongside relational and NoSQL stores
• Define the team’s standards for using AI safely across design, coding, testing, review, deployment and documentation
• Make sure AI-generated output is validated, non-deterministic model behaviour is accounted for, and payment data is protected
• Own the architecture of the systems you work on and document trade-offs across scalability, security, performance and cost
• Make sure services handle high-volume payment traffic, finding and fixing bottlenecks before customers feel them
• Lead code reviews, including AI-assisted code, and define the testing approach for your area, including how AI features are tested and monitored in production
• Own services through to production: containerise, improve CI/CD and deploy to AWS or Azure
• Mentor engineers, including in the disciplined use of AI tools

Ideal candidate

• 7+ years as a software engineer or developer, including leading technical delivery; an IT diploma or degree is preferred
• Strong .NET 8 C#, JavaScript and React; Python is a strong advantage
• Proven LLM development beyond basic prompt and response, such as context engineering, embeddings and RAG
• A track record of shipping AI-powered features to production
• Experience leading a migration or replatforming of a live, high-volume system
• Strong system design experience across relational, NoSQL and vector databases
• AWS or Azure, plus Docker and Kubernetes
• Able to influence and coach others, with a pragmatic view of AI as the normal way of working