Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer- Artificial Intelligence

Location: Cape Town based Hybrid role (2 days in office/week)

Team: Engineering / Salus Intelligence

Reports to: Chief Technology Officer

About Salus

Salus is an end-to-end DevOps platform built to help scaling companies ship software faster, more securely, and with less overhead. Designed by seasoned DevSecOps leaders, Salus enables engineering teams to go from code to production in minutes—not months—by embedding best practices into an intelligent, streamlined platform. Whether you're a fast-growing startup or an established enterprise, Salus helps reduce time-to-market, improve reliability, and cut cloud costs, all while minimizing security risks.

Responsibilities

As a Principal Software Engineer at Salus, you are both a technical expert and an engineering leader. You will set the standard for high-quality solutions, drive key architectural decisions, and mentor engineers across the organization.

You will help lead the development of AI-driven features that power automation, insights, and intelligent experiences within the platform. You will work across generative AI, prompt engineering, systems integration, and general AI infrastructure to create intelligent workflows that deliver real value to engineering teams.

You'll collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, including product, DevOps, and platform engineers, to embed AI into the core user experience while ensuring performance, reliability, and ethical standards are upheld

Join our Salus Intelligence team, where we integrate Artificial Intelligence into our platform using LangChain, LangGraph, and Python.

Technical Leadership & Execution

• Design simple solutions to complex problems.
• Architect and build scalable, extensible, maintainable, secure and performant systems.
• Produce quality, scalable, and maintainable code that demonstrates engineering excellence
• Own technical direction within a product area or domain, guiding architecture, patterns, and platform decisions
• Solve challenging technical problems with minimal guidance, driving systemic improvements across teams
• Lead complex initiatives from concept to delivery, coordinating efforts across functions and stakeholders

AI Feature Development & Integration

• Design and evolve systems that incorporate LLMs and collaborative, multi-agent architectures into Salus's DevOps workflows.
• Build abstractions and APIs that make AI capabilities accessible, reliable, and scalable across the platform.
• Design and implement AI-enabled product features using tools like LangChain, LangGraph, Claude, Gemini and Python.
• Integrate AI capabilities into web, CLI, and API surfaces in collaboration with frontend/backend teams
• Develop pipelines for data collection, feature extraction, and model inference, where applicable

Mentorship & Team Growth

• Mentor engineers at all levels through pairing, code reviews, and active knowledge-sharing
• Champion a culture of continuous learning, coaching team members in cloud-native best practices and scalable software design
• Promote a culture of ownership and excellence across the engineering organization

Collaboration & Product Delivery

• Partner with Product Managers and Designers to translate product vision into robust technical solutions
• Contribute to product planning and technical scoping, ensuring feasibility and alignment with strategic goals
• Collaborate closely with DevOps, Security, and SRE teams to ensure reliability, observability, and compliance

Code Quality & Standards

• Set and uphold high standards for clean code, maintainability, and performance
• Participate in and lead code reviews, providing constructive feedback and raising the bar for engineering quality
• Define and drive standardization in tooling, patterns, and development practices

Efficiency & Technical Debt Management

• Proactively identify technical debt and areas for refactoring, advocating for sustainable engineering approaches
• Improve team velocity by addressing bottlenecks, enabling better testing, CI/CD pipelines, and system reliability
• Contribute to internal tooling and platform enhancements to improve developer experience

Requirements

We're looking for a deeply experienced engineer with a passion for building exceptional software and uplifting those around them.

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Solid understanding of software architecture principles.
• Deep experience building cloud-native applications using technologies like .NET, Go Lang, Python
• Experience with LangChain, LangGraph, Vertex AI, and FastAPI
• Expertise in designing and scaling microservices, APIs, and distributed systems
• Proficient in relational and non-relational databases such as PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
• Experience deploying and managing applications on cloud platforms, preferably Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Amazon Web Service (AWS)
• Demonstrated ability to lead large-scale projects and influence engineering strategy
• Exceptional problem-solving and critical-thinking skills
• Strong communication and documentation skills; able to articulate complex technical concepts clearly
• Passion for quality, performance, security, and developer experience
• Familiarity with containerization, and container orchestration using Kubernetes.
• Familiarity with observability stacks like Grafana, Loki, and Prometheus
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills; comfortable working in cross-functional, hybrid and remote teams

Nice to Have (Bonus Points)

• Experience building on top of Generative AI, focusing on producing user value through LLM integrations.
• Prior experience in startup or high-growth SaaS environments

Job Type: Full-time

Work Location: In person