Senior Development Engineer (AI Agents, Customer Operations)

About the role

AnyVan is looking for a senior engineer to design, build and operate the AI agents that power its Sales and Customer Service teams. These agents hold real conversations with customers, answering questions, qualifying leads, quoting moves and resolving issues across phone, chat and messaging. You will own them end to end, from how they reason and what tools and data they use, to evaluation, guardrails and observability that keep them accurate, on-brand and safe in production.

Key responsibilities

• Design, build and operate production-grade systems that scale
• Tackle complex technical challenges across backend, infrastructure, data flows and AI/ML pipelines
• Write clean, pragmatic, well-tested code with long-term maintainability in mind
• Work closely with product, data and commercial stakeholders and influence technical direction and architecture
• Ship regular improvements to production while balancing speed with long-term sustainability
• Champion testing, observability and quality improvements
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar across the team

Required profile

• Experience in a scale-up or fast-growing product environment
• Strong backend engineering skills (Go, Java, Python or similar)
• Solid understanding of distributed systems, scalability and performance
• Experience with CI/CD, modern deployment practices and cloud infrastructure
• Comfort with ambiguity and evolving requirements, and a bias toward action
• Cape Town-based, able to commute to the CBD and onsite at least 3 days per week
• Fully eligible to work in South Africa

Required skills

• Backend languages: Go, Java, Python or similar
• Cloud infrastructure (AWS)
• Bonus: exposure to AI/ML systems, marketplaces, logistics, pricing or e-commerce

What we offer

• Competitive salary
• 20 days off plus public holidays and Christmas Eve
• R1000 per month health and wellbeing allowance
• 5% share scheme
• Free parking or transport home after 7pm
• In-house coffee, free daily breakfast, weekly drinks and social events
• Career growth within a fast-moving technology company