AI Engineer
Build and productionise agentic AI systems on a major international transformation — combining open-source models, cloud infrastructure and enterprise integration. Open to South Africa-based candidates.
The role
We're looking for a hands-on AI Engineer to join a programme delivering six significant AI initiatives, building self-contained, agentic AI systems on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
The focus is on deploying and integrating proven open-source technologies — including Qwen-family models and other leading open-source LLMs — into secure, production-grade enterprise solutions. This is not a role centred on demos or experimentation alone: you'll work across the full AI engineering lifecycle, including agent and multi-agent architecture, LLM deployment, model serving, APIs, enterprise integration, MLOps, evaluation and productionisation.
You'll work alongside Data Engineers, Product Owners, architects and client stakeholders to turn complex transformation objectives into practical AI systems that operate reliably at enterprise scale.
Location: an international assignment based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for the duration of the project. On completion, you'll join our Cape Town team, working hybrid (three days a week in the office) across a range of UK client projects. Open to South Africa-based candidates.
What we're looking for
An experienced AI Engineer with strong software-engineering fundamentals and genuine hands-on experience taking modern AI beyond proof of concept and into production. Particularly important:
- Strong hands-on Python engineering experience.
- Practical experience designing and building agentic AI applications.
- Strong understanding of agent and multi-agent system architecture.
- Experience deploying and integrating large language models into production applications.
- Hands-on experience working with open-source LLMs, rather than solely consuming hosted commercial APIs.
- Understanding of LLM deployment, model serving and inference architecture; model optimisation and/or fine-tuning where appropriate.
- Experience designing and building APIs and integrations between AI applications and enterprise systems.
- Strong understanding of how agents interact with tools, APIs, enterprise applications and data sources.
- Practical experience establishing MLOps practices, and of AI evaluation, monitoring, observability, testing and guardrails.
- Strong software engineering practices including version control, automated testing and deployment.
- Ability to translate broader business or transformation objectives into workable technical solutions, and to document architecture and design decisions clearly.
- Confidence working with senior technical and business stakeholders across multiple concurrent workstreams.
Relevant experience
Experience in the following would be particularly valuable — you don't need every technology, but you should have strong enough fundamentals to pick up new models and platforms quickly:
- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), including compute, storage and AI/ML services.
- Cloud-native AI architecture and deployment; containerisation and production deployment of AI services.
- Agent frameworks and orchestration technologies.
- LLM inference and model-serving frameworks.
- API-first and event-driven integration approaches.
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation, embeddings and vector search.
- Model evaluation and AI observability tooling.
- Enterprise security, identity and access-control patterns; CI/CD and automated deployment.
We'd love it if you also have
- Direct experience with Qwen / Alibaba models.
- Experience contributing to or working extensively with open-source AI projects.
- Previous banking or financial services delivery, or experience in another highly regulated environment.
- OCI certifications.
- Experience with Saudi data-residency, privacy or security requirements, or Middle East / MENA market experience.
- Arabic language skills; consulting or professional-services experience.
- Accommodation and agreed living costs in Riyadh are covered, together with one return flight home each month.
- A 10% project completion bonus, on top of salary.
- On completion you join our Cape Town team on UK client projects.
How our process works: add your details and CV using the form, and we’ll review your experience and suitability. If it’s a strong match, we’ll be in touch to arrange a conversation.
Add your details
Tell us a little about you and attach your CV. We’ll review and get in touch if it’s a good match.