Overview
Forward Deployed Engineer (AI-First) Jobs in South Africa at HIREXE
Title: Forward Deployed Engineer (AI-First)
Company: HIREXE
Location: South Africa
Forward Deployed Engineer (AI-First) — Internal, Full-Time
Role Purpose
Sits between the internal team (recruitment, operations, and customer success) and the company's technical/AI infrastructure. Embeds directly into day-to-day workflows to identify friction points and rapidly build, deploy, and iterate on AI-powered tooling that solves them — rather than waiting on a traditional internal IT/product cycle.
Logistics
- Employment type: Full-time
- Location: Fully remote (South Africa-based)
- Working hours: Aligned to EST (Eastern Standard Time)
- Reports to: CEO
Core Responsibilities
- Work side-by-side with team members across recruitment, operations, and customer success to observe real day-to-day workflows and identify where AI tooling can remove friction
- Rapidly prototype and ship internal tools/automations (e.g. reporting pipelines, sourcing assistants, scorecard generators, candidate-matching logic, client-facing status updates, internal process trackers)
- Own integration work across the existing stack (databases, cloud storage, internal dashboards, communication tools)
- Build with and around LLM/AI APIs (Claude, GPT, etc.) as core building blocks, not bolt-ons
- Continuously iterate based on direct team feedback — short build/test/refine loops rather than long release cycles
- Translate ad hoc team requests ("can this report auto-generate?", "can we flag at-risk accounts automatically?", "can this onboarding step be automated?") into working systems
- Maintain documentation of what's been built so tools are maintainable and not just one-off scripts
Ideal Background
- Strong full-stack or backend engineering skills; Python and/or JavaScript preferred
- Hands-on experience building with LLM APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.) — prompting, tool use, structured outputs, agentic workflows
- Comfortable with ambiguity and evolving specs — this role is defined by the problems it finds, not a fixed backlog
- Data integration/ETL experience (APIs, spreadsheets, CRMs, databases)
- Prior startup, consulting, or "internal tools" experience — someone used to wearing multiple hats and building for a small, specific audience
- Strong communication skills — needs to sit with non-technical team members, understand their pain points, and explain tradeoffs simply
- Comfortable working async and overlapping with EST hours despite South Africa time difference (typically a 6-7 hour gap, so this likely means an afternoon-into-evening SA schedule)
What Makes This "AI-First"
- Default posture is "how can AI solve this" before "how do we build this manually"
- Fluency in AI-assisted development (using tools like Claude Code) is expected, not a bonus
- Should be someone who's naturally exploring how agentic workflows, automation, and LLMs can compress operational and client-facing work
Success Looks Like
- Workflows across recruitment, operations, and customer success become measurably faster and less manual over time
- Tools are self-serve enough that non-technical team members can use them without ongoing engineering support
- A visible pipeline of shipped, iterated internal tools — not just prototypes