Overview
Lead AI Platform Engineer Jobs in Johannesburg, South Africa at Signant Health
About Signant Health
At Signant Health, we help bring life-changing treatments to patients faster. We are a global evidence generation company that supports clinical trials with smart technology, scientific expertise, and hands‑on operational support — so better data leads to better decisions in healthcare. We embrace AI and advanced technologies to enhance every aspect of what we do, from data analysis to operational efficiency.
Our teams work at the intersection of science, technology, and patient experience, delivering digital solutions powered by AI innovation that make clinical trials more efficient, more accurate, and more accessible around the world. Trusted by leading pharmaceutical companies and CROs, our platforms and services support studies across more than 90 countries and have contributed to hundreds of new drug approvals.
If you are motivated by meaningful work, global impact, and innovation in clinical research and digital health — including the opportunity to work with cutting‑edge AI technologies — you will find purpose and opportunity at Signant Health.
Lead AI Platform Engineer
We are seeking a Lead AI Platform Engineer to build and optimize Signant Health’s AI Platform and agents that automate workflows across our organization. This role sits at the intersection of application development and model optimization, requiring both strong software engineering fundamentals and expertise in generative AI technologies. You’ll be responsible for developing and optimizing our AI platform components, developing intelligent agents, implementing RAG systems, and ensuring high‑quality, secure, and compliant AI responses through rigorous evaluation frameworks and robust guardrails.
This position offers the opportunity to shape how AI transforms our organization’s operations, working on production systems that directly impact efficiency and innovation across multiple teams while maintaining the highest standards of data security, privacy, and regulatory compliance.
Essential Duties And Responsibilities Application Development
- Design and implement AI‑powered agents that automate complex, multi‑step workflows across the organization
- Build RAG (Retrieval‑Augmented Generation) systems using vector stores and knowledge bases to ground AI responses in organizational knowledge
- Develop prompt engineering strategies and context optimization techniques to maximize accuracy and reliability of AI outputs
- Create integrations between AI systems and existing tools, APIs, and data sources
- Implement memory systems and state management for conversational agents and long‑running workflows
Platform Optimization & Evaluation
- Develop comprehensive evaluation frameworks to measure accuracy, relevance, and quality of AI system responses
- Design and execute experiments to optimize agent performance, including A/B testing of different prompting strategies
- Monitor production AI systems and implement improvements based on performance metrics and user feedback
- Optimize inference costs and latency while maintaining quality standards
- Build tooling and dashboards for observability into AI system behavior
Model Development & Fine‑Tuning
- Engineer datasets for training and fine‑tuning language models on organization‑specific tasks
- Implement and evaluate fine‑tuning pipelines for LLMs and SLMs (Small Language Models)
- Optimize model inference for production environments, balancing speed, cost, and quality
- Conduct experiments to determine when fine‑tuning, prompt engineering, or RAG approaches are most appropriate
- Stay current with advances in language models and evaluate new models for potential organizational use
Security & Compliance
- Design and implement guardrails and content filtering mechanisms to prevent harmful or inappropriate AI outputs
- Develop hallucination detection and mitigation strategies to ensure factual accuracy and reliability of agent responses
- Establish security policies for AI systems including data access controls, prompt injection prevention, and sensitive information handling
- Create compliance frameworks that align AI systems with regulatory requirements (GDPR, HIPAA, SOC2, etc.) and industry standards
- Implement monitoring and…
Title: Lead AI Platform Engineer
Company: Signant Health
Location: Johannesburg, South Africa
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