Closing date: 09 October 2026
Location: On-site, Norwood Johannesburg (Cape Town office opening soon and will accept applications from Cape Town candidates)
Type: Full-time / Contract
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Join Edufern and be part of a mission to transform education in South Africa!​

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Company Overview:

Edufern is a South African EdTech company developing innovative educational technology and learning solutions for schools and communities. Our mission is to address educational challenges through accessible, engaging and locally relevant technology, with a particular focus on supporting disadvantaged and underserved communities across South Africa.

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Job Overview:

We are looking for an experienced and hands-on AI / ML Engineer to design, build and integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities into our educational technology products.

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You will work on practical AI applications that support learning, assessment, reading, personalisation and educational content, with a particular focus on solutions that can operate effectively in the South African context.

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This role requires someone who can move beyond prototypes and experimentation to build reliable AI functionality that can be deployed and evaluated in real-world production environments.

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You will work closely with our development team to integrate AI capabilities into existing applications and help determine the most appropriate models, architectures and technologies for different use cases.

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Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop and integrate AI/ML functionality into production educational applications built on .NET/C#

• Build and evaluate AI-powered features using LLMs, machine learning models and AI APIs

• Develop NLP and language-processing functionality for educational applications

• Work with speech recognition, audio processing and related technologies where required

• Design and implement RAG and knowledge-retrieval systems

• Evaluate and compare models based on accuracy, latency, cost and suitability for production use

• Develop model evaluation and testing frameworks to measure the quality and reliability of AI outputs

• Build APIs and services that allow AI functionality to integrate cleanly with our existing .NET/MAUI/Blazor applications

• Work with structured and unstructured educational data

• Optimise AI functionality for cost, performance and constrained connectivity environments

• Investigate local and offline AI models where appropriate

• Work directly alongside the full-stack development team to ship AI features into web, desktop and mobile applications — not in isolation from them

• Monitor and improve AI systems based on real-world performance and user feedback

• Keep up to date with developments in AI/ML and identify technologies that could meaningfully improve our products

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Required Skills & Experience

• Professional experience taking an AI/ML feature from prototype through to a real production deployment — able to speak to what broke under real users or real data, and how it was fixed

• Strong Python development skills

• Working proficiency in C# / .NET, sufficient to integrate AI functionality directly into our existing application stack

• Hands-on experience working with machine-learning frameworks and/or modern AI platforms

• Experience integrating LLMs or other AI models into production applications

• Strong understanding of APIs, databases and backend development

• Experience preparing, processing and working with structured and unstructured data

• Understanding of model evaluation, testing and performance measurement

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills

• Ability to explain technical AI concepts clearly to developers and non-technical stakeholders

Nice to Have

• Experience with speech recognition, speech-to-text or audio processing

• Experience with NLP, particularly multilingual NLP

• Experience working with African languages or other low-resource languages

• Experience with RAG, embeddings and vector databases

• Experience with local or offline LLMs and model optimisation

• Experience with fine-tuning or adapting machine-learning models

• Experience with Azure AI, OpenAI APIs or other major cloud AI platforms

• Experience with educational assessment, adaptive learning or personalised learning systems

• Experience developing AI applications for low-bandwidth or offline environments

• EdTech or education-sector experience

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Applicants who have not received a reply within four weeks of the closing date may assume their application has been unsuccessful.

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