Developer (Junior) – AI Engineering

About this role

Discovery is hiring a junior developer for its Data Science Lab in Sandton. The Lab builds AI and data solutions that help members live healthier lives and support Discovery’s wider business. This role focuses on the engineering side: getting AI solutions from testing into stable, live systems.

What you’ll do

• Help deploy, run and maintain AI and machine learning solutions across the Lab’s projects.
• Build reusable engineering parts, deployment tools and internal operational tooling.
• Help find and fix problems in live systems, including failed deployments and platform incidents.
• Watch system health, raise issues early and pass them on to the right people.
• Support generative AI and conversational AI features under the guidance of senior engineers, including LLM services and APIs.
• Help set up monitoring, logging, dashboards and alerts, and take part in root cause reviews.
• Write technical documentation and runbooks, and take part in code reviews and test automation.

What you need

• A Bachelor’s or Honours degree in a quantitative field such as Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Actuarial Science, Operations Research, Industrial Engineering or Applied Mathematics.
• Equivalent qualifications or other routes may be considered if you show strong analytical and technical skills.
• Working knowledge of Python for data analysis and machine learning.
• Experience with SQL, relational databases and structured data.
• Solid foundations in statistics, machine learning and model evaluation.
• Basic understanding of AI, machine learning and model deployment.
• Good problem-solving skills and clear communication within multidisciplinary teams.
• Writing clean, well-documented and reusable code.
• Advantageous: exposure to generative AI, LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) or AI agents.
• Advantageous: experience with AWS, Azure or Google Cloud Platform.
• Advantageous: knowledge of Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines or MLOps.
• Advantageous: exposure to monitoring and logging tools, or to Linux and scripting.
• Advantageous: prior industry experience, including in healthcare, insurance or personalisation. Projects, internships and hackathons also count.

Is this job for you?

This job suits a curious, early-career software, data or AI engineer who wants to build reliable AI systems. You should enjoy learning, working with mentors and solving practical technical problems. If you want to focus mainly on statistical research, this is not that kind of role.

Tips before you apply

• Have your degree or transcript, and any academic or personal projects, ready to share. Link to code samples or a GitHub profile if you have them.
• On your CV, show hands-on Python, SQL or deployment work. Describe what you built and how you tested or monitored it.
• Explain how you have solved a technical problem, such as debugging an error or improving a process. Use clear examples.

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