Principal: AI & Product Engineer

Cellulant is Africa’s leading payments company, providing seamless, secure and innovative solutions that empower businesses, banks, and global brands to thrive in a fast-changing global economy. With a presence in over 24 countries and 200+ payment methods, including cards, bank transfers, and mobile money, our single API payment platform, Tingg, simplifies collections, disbursements, and reconciliations.

This role is responsible for building production-grade AI features leveraging LLMs, embeddings, agent orchestration frameworks, and secure cloud-native architectures. The role begins as a hands-on Principal IC focused on delivering AI features, and evolves into the founding engineer and lead for our internal AI Platform, including prompt gateways, vector search infrastructure, agent orchestration, and reusable AI APIs for all product squads.

1. Deliver AI Features for Reconciliation & Onboarding (Phase 1 Priority)
2. AI Engineering, LLM Integration & Agent Orchestration
3. Cloud-Native & Enterprise Engineering Responsibilities
4. Cross-Functional Collaboration & Product Influence
5. AI Platform Evolution (Phase 2 Priority)

1. Strong experience integrating LLMs into production systems.
2. Hands-on prompt engineering, guardrails, and hallucination mitigation experience.
3. Experience building cloud-native AI services.
4. 8+ years as a senior/principal engineer building large-scale enterprise systems.
5. Deep experience with Java/Spring Boot, REST APIs & microservices, Kafka or RabbitMQ, AWS + Kubernetes + Docker, Postgres or MySQL, Redis + Elastic.
6. Deep understanding of the end to end payments processing workflows.