Principal Java Engineer: AI Augmentation and Engineering Systems
DVT · Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa ·
- Work mode
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Principal
- Category
- Software engineering
DVT · Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa ·
DVT is looking for an exceptional Principal Engineer to lead the technical implementation of AI augmented software engineering across a large and complex engineering environment.
This is a senior individual contributor position, equivalent in influence to a Head of Engineering, but without direct line management responsibility. The successful candidate will remain deeply hands on, writing production code, building engineering tooling and setting technical standards across multiple development teams and technology stacks.
The role will be responsible for designing and implementing the engineering foundations required for safe, measurable and repeatable AI assisted software delivery. This includes agent scaffolding, retrieval and context layers, prompt and workflow libraries, evaluation frameworks, guardrails, developer tooling and engineering telemetry.
Key Responsibilities
Design and build platforms supporting AI assisted software development
Develop agentic workflows, retrieval solutions, context layers and evaluation frameworks
Integrate AI capabilities into developer tooling and CI/CD pipelines
Establish guardrails and engineering standards for AI generated code
Create integration patterns across Java, .NET, React and Flutter environments
Build telemetry to measure delivery, quality, defects and productivity
Evaluate AI models, platforms, tools and third party services
Lead technical reviews, prototypes and architecture discussions
Mentor senior engineers and influence technical direction across multiple teams
Ensure solutions meet security, regulatory and data protection requirements
Technical Requirements
10 or more years of software engineering experience
Proven hands on delivery at senior, staff or principal level
Deep production experience in at least two of the following:
Java, .NET, React, Flutter
Working knowledge of the remaining technology stacks
Strong AWS and cloud native architecture experience
Experience with microservices, event driven systems, APIs and CI/CD
Experience building internal platforms or developer tooling used across multiple teams
AI Engineering Requirements
Practical experience building and shipping AI enabled engineering solutions
Large language model application patterns
Agentic workflows and tool use
Retrieval augmented generation and context engineering
Prompt and workflow design
Model evaluation and benchmarking
Evaluation harnesses, regression testing and guardrails
Understanding of generative AI security, safety and production failure modes
Advisory or strategy experience without practical implementation will not be sufficient.
Leadership Requirements
Proven technical leadership across multiple teams
Ability to influence without direct authority
Strong mentoring and engineering enablement skills
Ability to communicate technical decisions to technical and business stakeholders
Confidence to defend technical decisions under commercial pressure
Qualifications
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Engineering or a related field.
Ideal Candidate Profile
The ideal candidate is a deeply technical Principal Engineer who combines strong software engineering fundamentals with practical AI engineering experience.
You should be comfortable writing production code, building platforms for other engineers, working across different technology stacks and influencing technical direction at organisational level.
You will be expected to solve problems where no established implementation pattern exists and where decisions carry significant operational, security and regulatory consequences.
This role is best suited to someone who wants broad technical influence while continuing to build, prototype, test and ship working software.
** Principal Engineer role is positioned as a senior individual contributor at Head of Engineering equivalence.
The role carries no headcount, budget authority or line management responsibility.
Its seniority derives from its technical influence across the engineering environment and its accountability for delivering the technical foundation of the organisation’s transformation.
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