AI Leader / Executive (AI, ML)

This senior leadership role is responsible for defining, architecting, and scaling next-generation AI systems within a highly regulated financial environment. The ideal AI Leader combines deep technical expertise in agentic architectures with hands-on experience building production-grade AI platforms that support real-time decisioning, compliance workflows, and risk-sensitive operations. This position oversees engineering strategy, long-term AI roadmap development, platform governance, and cross-functional alignment with product, security, and regulatory teams.

Responsibilities:

• Set the technical vision and multi-year roadmap for enterprise AI systems.
• Guide architecture decisions for autonomous agents, orchestration layers, and intelligent processing pipelines.
• Partner closely with executives across risk, compliance, and engineering to ensure scalable and audit-ready AI adoption.
• Lead the design and delivery of core agentic platforms that integrate tool-use, function-calling, and dynamic reasoning methods.
• Oversee the development of robust AI infrastructure, including retrieval systems, inference layers, monitoring, and platform reliability.
• Ensure production systems meet high standards for latency, resilience, data integrity, and regulatory transparency.
• Implement platform-wide guardrails, model oversight, and safety controls for AI-driven workflows.
• Mentor engineering leaders and scale high-performance AI/ML teams.

Qualifications and Experience:

• 10+ years in engineering leadership roles with ownership of platform-level architecture.
• Track record of building high-scale AI systems in complex, regulated industries.
• Exceptional communication skills and the ability to influence senior stakeholders.
• Strong background in financial services, payments, lending, or regulatory technology.
• Proven ability to design AI systems that operate within strict compliance, risk, and audit constraints.
• Experience with real-time analytics, fraud detection, transactional oversight, or other mission-critical financial applications.

The reference number for this position is NG60926 which is a permanent Hybrid position based in Johannesburg offering a cost to company of up to R1.2mil CTC negotiable on experience and ability. Contact Nokuthula at e-merge.co.za or call her on 011 463 3633 to discuss this and other opportunities.

Are you ready for a change of scenery? E-Merge IT recruitment is a specialist niche recruitment agency. We offer our candidates options so that we can successfully place the right developers with the right companies in the right roles. Check out the E-Merge website www.e-merge.co.za for more great positions.

Do you have a friend who is a developer or technology specialist? We pay cash for successful referrals!

Posted on 27 Nov 09:00, Closing date 26 Jan