Senior Software Engineer, Applied AI | On-site | George WC at Badger Holdings (Pty) Ltd

In brief

**Overview** Badger Holdings (Pty) Ltd is a specialized insurance and related services company, founded in 1995, employing over 700 staff across South Africa and Australia, and insuring over 180,000 clients with premiums exceeding US$100 million. This role is within ARC AI, a division focused on building AI agents as products. These systems operate autonomously across business functions, handle real customer interactions, and deliver measurable outcomes within a regulated insurance environment. This is a production-focused function, not an experimentation role. **What you will do** You will design, build, and operate the AI agent systems that power ARC AI products, owning the full spectrum of activities including architecture, evaluation pipelines, production reliability, guardrails, and the backend integrations connecting agents to enterprise data. A key responsibility is to set the engineering standards for the team, emphasizing evaluation as a primary concern. This involves architecting enforcement mechanisms outside the model for security and ensuring compliance with POPIA and GDPR through initial architectural decisions. The architectural decisions made in this role will form the foundation for all subsequent engineering efforts. **Requirements (from the original advert)** **Non-negotiable:** * Demonstrated experience building and shipping AI agent systems in production (not demos or internal tools that never went live). * Ownership of an evaluation pipeline for a production AI system (defining metrics, building frameworks, and using them for deployment decisions). * Experience debugging production AI failures, tracing silent agent degradation to root causes in live systems. * Proficiency in Python and LLM frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, or equivalent). * RAG architecture: retrieval pipeline design, vector database implementation, chunking and embedding strategy. * API design and backend integration at production scale. * Secure tool access patterns for agentic systems, understanding the boundary between LLM reasoning and deterministic enforcement. * Experience implementing guardrails: input validation, output filtering, and execution-layer prompt injection defense. * CI/CD for agentic systems, including implementing progressive delivery pipelines with instrumentation of tool invocations and decision points, staging with regression benchmarks, and canary deployment to detect behavioral drift. **Strong Advantage:** * Experience in regulated financial services, insurance, or healthcare environments. * Familiarity with graph-based agentic orchestration frameworks (LangGraph or equivalent), particularly durable execution and human-in-the-loop checkpointing in regulated environments. * Familiarity with Azure AI tooling and services. * MLOps practices: monitoring, observability, cost management for inference workloads. * CRM and enterprise system integration. **Educational Requirements:** * Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, or a related field. * OR equivalent practical industry experience building and deploying production-grade AI systems. **Who should apply** This role is ideal for a Senior Software Engineer who has a proven track record of building and operating AI agent systems in production environments. The candidate should understand the entire lifecycle of moving an AI agent from prototype to live deployment, with a strong emphasis on evaluation as a critical factor for delivering reliable AI products rather than just rapid iteration. Applicants should possess deep technical expertise in Python, LLM frameworks, RAG architecture, API design, and CI/CD for agentic systems, coupled with a commitment to architectural integrity, security, and regulatory compliance (POPIA, GDPR). Those with experience in regulated industries like financial services, insurance, or healthcare, and familiarity with advanced AI orchestration and MLOps practices, will have a strong advantage. **Deadline** Not specified **Reference** Original posting: https://www.myjobmag.co.za/job/senior-software-engineer-applied-ai-on-site-george-wc-badger-holdings-pty-ltd-3 Source: myjobmag

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At a glance

• Python
• Azure

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