Senior Engineer II, Lelapa AI

About Us

Lelapa AI is building a localised African AI lab and pioneering language technologies designed for Africans, by Africans—pushing the boundaries of AI research, product development, and technological innovation. As a fast-growing, high-impact AI startup, our distributed team across Africa, Europe, and North America is shaping the future of AI on the continent. The coming wave of African AI talent needs a home to continue their work: to do their best research, and to convert the results into products that improve African lives. Lelapa AI will be that home.

About The Role

We are looking for an experienced Senior Engineer II to spearhead our engineering efforts in bringing African AI to production. This is an 80% hands-on role where you’ll both architect and build our API product platform while providing technical leadership to the development team. You’ll be responsible for upholding engineering best practices and ensuring the successful delivery of our products. The ideal candidate has strong backend experience (developing robust, scalable, APIs and integrations), frontend knowledge (for product demonstrations), and a proven track record of leading technical teams through successful product releases. DevOps, cloud development or Quality Engineering experience are a plus.

Responsibilities

• Directly contribute to code development (80% hands-on) to foster an engineering culture that balances rapid delivery with technical quality and sustainability
• Work with Engineering Leadership to implement just-enough process and tooling to enable to enable consistent, predictable delivery cadences without unnecessary overhead
• Manage the software development pipeline, to support data-driven decisions on task prioritization and resource allocation
• Work with Engineering Leadership in setting the technical direction and architecture decisions for our API product platform
• Mentor and provide technical guidance to development team members
• Drive engineering excellence through code reviews, architecture discussions, and documentation
• Establish and maintain development standards, best practices, and processes
• Collaborate with product and data science/research teams to translate AI capabilities into useful features
• Own the reliability and performance of production systems
  
  

Requirements And Skills

• BSc in Computer Science or similar
• 6+ years of software engineering experience, with some experience in leading a development team
• Proven experience architecting, building, and maintaining production API platforms
• Deep expertise in at least one backend language (Python, Go, Rust, Java) and strong knowledge of JavaScript/TypeScript
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Strong understanding of API design principles, security best practices, and performance optimization
• Experience integrating AI/ML models into production applications is a plus
• Experience working in fast-paced startup environments and ability to manage competing priorities
• Experience in Test Driven Development and test engineering
• Well-versed in automation and CI/CD
• Analytical mind with problem-solving aptitude
  
  

Benefits

• Flexible work arrangements with remote-friendly policies
• Opportunity to lead technical innovation in a high-growth AI startup
• Medical aid contribution
• Substantial parental leave.
• Work with cutting-edge AI technologies focused on African languages and use cases
• 25 days of vacation leave
• Direct impact on product architecture and technology decisions
  
  

Remuneration

R 80 000 - R 100 000 per month (depending on experience)