Senior Machine Learning Engineer – Production ML at FinTech (Hybrid)

About the role

This is an excellent opportunity for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer with strong Python, production ML, MLOps and cloud engineering experience to take Machine Learning out of the notebook and make it work at scale within one of South Africa’s leading FinTech businesses. The position is based in Cape Town on a hybrid schedule (2 days in‑office per week) and offers a salary of R1.35 m – R1.5 m per year.

Key responsibilities

• Design and build production‑ready ML systems, ensuring reliability, scalability, low latency and high throughput.
• Develop real‑time, event‑driven data pipelines and model serving infrastructure using technologies such as Kafka, Pub/Sub and containerised workloads.
• Implement cloud‑native ML infrastructure on GCP/AWS/Azure, leveraging Docker, Kubernetes and Terraform.
• Create CI/CD/CT pipelines, MLOps tooling, and monitoring/observability solutions for ML models.
• Collaborate with data scientists and engineers to translate experimental models into robust, production‑grade services.

Required profile

• Strong experience productionising Machine Learning systems, not just model training.
• Advanced Python programming and solid SQL knowledge.
• Hands‑on experience with real‑time/distributed systems (Kafka, Kafka Connect, Pub/Sub).
• Proficiency in containerised, cloud‑native environments (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code, preferably Terraform.
• Ability to design systems focused on throughput, latency, performance and reliability.
• Familiarity with big‑data processing frameworks (Spark, Dataflow, Flink).
• Experience building or contributing to CI/CD/CT and MLOps pipelines.
• Knowledge of ML lifecycle tools such as MLflow, Kubeflow or DVC.
• Experience deploying production workloads on GCP, AWS or Azure.

Required skills

• Python
• SQL
• Kafka / Kafka Connect / Pub/Sub
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Terraform
• Spark
• Dataflow
• Flink
• MLflow
• Kubeflow
• DVC
• CI/CD
• GCP
• AWS
• Azure