South Africa: AI Ops Lead – Banking & Financial Services – International – up to R2mil per annum posted by E-Merge

Are you passionate about bringing Artificial Intelligence to life in critical banking operations?

We’re seeking an experienced AI Ops Lead to drive the operationalization of AI and Generative AI solutions across our financial ecosystem. You’ll ensure that AI models powering credit decisions, fraud detection, AML compliance, KYC, customer engagement, and automation are reliable, explainable, and compliant with regulatory standards.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the end-to-end AI lifecycle – from deployment and monitoring to retraining and retirement.
• Build scalable AI Ops pipelines across hybrid, on-prem, and cloud environments.
• Define and manage SLAs ensuring uptime and stability for AI models in production.
• Implement observability, drift detection, and fairness frameworks for responsible AI.
• Collaborate with Compliance, Risk, and Internal Audit to meet governance and regulatory requirements.
• Mentor an AI Ops team, guiding engineers and analysts to productionize cutting-edge AI solutions.
• Integrate emerging GenAI and LLMOps tooling for copilots, knowledge retrieval, and automation use cases.

Qualifications and Experience:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or Engineering.
• 8-12 years of experience in Data/AI/MLOps, with at least 3-5 years in financial services or other regulated environments.
• Proven experience operationalizing AI in banking contexts – credit risk, fraud, AML, collections, or compliance.
• Proficiency with MLOps tools (MLflow, Kubeflow, SageMaker, Vertex AI, Databricks ML).
• Strong cloud and container orchestration experience (AWS, GCP, Azure; Kubernetes, Docker).
• Hands-on with Python, ML frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch, Scikit-learn), and GenAI stacks (LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, PromptLayer).
• Understanding of model risk management, explainability, bias/fairness, and regulatory compliance.

The Reference Number for this position is NG60855 which is a Permanent, hybrid position in Dubai offering a salary of up to R2mil CTC salary negotiable based on experience. E-mail Nokuthula on *****@*****.co.za or call her for a chat on (***)***-**** to discuss this and other opportunities.

Are you ready for a change of scenery? e-Merge IT recruitment is a niche recruitment agency. We offer our candidates options so that we can successfully place the right people with the right companies, in the right roles. Check out the e-Merge IT website www.********.co.za for more great positions.

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