Senior/Lead AI & ML Engineer

About the role

Seismic Consulting Group is building a portfolio of production AI systems that power high‑stakes workflows for consumer‑facing platforms and enterprise knowledge tools across Africa. As a Senior/Lead AI & ML Engineer you will take technical ownership of these systems, delivering end‑to‑end solutions while guiding the engineering team.

Key responsibilities

• Define the technical architecture and roadmap for AI/ML products, including model selection, fine‑tuning, and prompting strategies for large language models.
• Design and implement retrieval‑augmented generation, vector search, and knowledge‑retrieval pipelines that meet production latency, cost, and scalability requirements.
• Own end‑to‑end delivery of AI/ML features, from design through deployment, ensuring reliable performance under real user load.
• Build and maintain model‑serving, inference, and GPU/compute optimization pipelines.
• Develop CI/CD pipelines, containerized deployment workflows, and infrastructure‑as‑code practices for reproducible environments.
• Implement monitoring, logging, and alerting for model and system performance, and manage cloud infrastructure cost‑performance optimization.
• Mentor engineers, set engineering standards, and act as the technical authority for scaling decisions.

Required profile

• 8+ months of experience (approximately 8 years) delivering production‑grade AI/ML systems, preferably with large language models.
• Proven ability to lead technical direction while writing production code.
• Strong problem‑solving skills in high‑availability, real‑time environments.
• Experience collaborating with product and operations teams to meet delivery timelines.

Required skills

• Large language model selection, fine‑tuning, and prompting
• Retrieval‑augmented generation and vector search
• Model serving and inference pipelines
• GPU/compute optimization
• CI/CD pipeline development
• Containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Monitoring, logging, and alerting systems
• Cloud infrastructure management and cost optimization
• Infrastructure‑as‑code (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation)