Principal: AI & Product Engineer - Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Zambia, Botswana

About Cellulant:

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. It processes over 4.5 million transactions daily for market leaders across
sectors such as
Airlines, Telecoms, E-commerce, Ride-Hailing, Retail, and Remittances. 

By simplifying how people pay and get paid, we drive trust, commerce and scale – and connect companies to their ambitions.
 

Our Story:

Across Africa, payments are more than transactions. They are gateways to prosperity, connecting people, businesses and communities to opportunities and growth.

From enabling a logistics company in Lusaka to pay suppliers across borders, to enabling a hospitality brand in Lagos to scale effortlessly, to supporting an airline in Nairobi to reconcile payments from multiple platforms, Cellulant is the bridge that makes it all possible. 

Through trusted technology and customer-centric innovation, we build connections that inspire progress, strengthen economies and transform payments into a tool for progress.

Since our founding in 2003, we've continuously adapted and grown, leveraging our experiences to simplify payments for businesses. We are driven by an unshakable belief that seamless people-centred payments are the key to unlocking prosperity. 

Today, Cellulant powers online and offline payment processing, allowing businesses to collect payments, send payouts, and accelerate business growth.

Our Mission: 

To deliver seamless, secure and innovative payment solutions for businesses. 

Our Vision: 

To create a connected world where businesses move money as easily as they share ideas.

Role Overview: 

We are hiring a Principal: AI & Product Engineer to lead the development and deployment of AI-driven product experiences across our B2B payments platform, with an initial focus on reconciliation and merchant onboarding workflows. 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.

This is a high-impact role with aggressive timelines—PoC delivery in 45 days and first production AI feature at day 90. The ideal candidate blends deep enterprise engineering experience, cloud native development expertise with strong AI systems intuition and a solid understanding of fintech/payments workflows.

What You'll do:

1. Deliver AI Features for Reconciliation & Onboarding (Phase 1 Priority)

• Build semi-autonomous AI agents to automate reconciliation workflows, including:
  • Payment method and bank reports/ statement ingestion
  • Transaction matching
  • Discrepancy analysis
  • Exception explanation and routing
  • Report generation
• Develop AI-assisted KYB/KYC extraction tools to accelerate onboarding:
  • Document parsing (IDs, certificates, statements).
  • Entity extraction & validation.
  • Risk flag identification.
• Build necessary API interfaces and Integrate AI services into existing/new microservices and event-driven pipelines.
  
  

2. AI Engineering, LLM Integration & Agent Orchestration

• Integrate with multiple LLM providers through a hybrid model strategy (commercial APIs + open-source models).

• Implement prompt engineering, safety guardrails, and mechanisms to mitigate hallucinations during workflow execution.

• Build and integrate semi-autonomous agents using LangGraph or similar frameworks.
• Design high-quality APIs, SDKs, and internal tooling to allow product squads to embed AI seamlessly.
• Work with vector databases (PGVector, Pinecone, Weaviate—nice to have) for retrieval augmentation, semantic search, and agent memory.
  
  

3. Cloud-Native & Enterprise Engineering Responsibilities

• Deploy cloud-native AI services on AWS using Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and secure infra patterns.
• Build scalable backend services using Spring Boot and event-driven flows via Kafka/RabbitMQ.
• Implement observability for AI systems (tracing, cost monitoring, latency, and prompt logs).
• Ensure strict compliance with:
  • PCI DSS (tokenization boundaries, card-data safety).
  • GDPR / data privacy
  • Sensitive document handling for KYC/KYB and bank/payment method statements.
  • Auditability and traceability for all AI outputs
  • Model governance & safe operations

4. Cross-Functional Collaboration & Product Influence

• Partner with Product, Data Engineering, Finance Ops, Risk Ops, and Compliance to automate high-impact workflows.
• Translate complex business processes into AI-driven workflows with clear, measurable outcomes.
• Partner with Engineering and Platform teams to design, evolve and build out our next-gen payment architecture ensuring scalability, and AI integration ready design from the get go.
• Contribute (but not own) data ingestion pipelines needed for AI agents (PDF/CSV parsing, structured extraction e.t.c).

5. AI Platform Evolution (Phase 2 Priority)

After demonstrating initial business value:

• Design and lead the build-out of our internal AI Platform, including:
  • AI gateway for model routing
  • Prompt library & prompt evaluation tooling
  • Retrieval pipelines & vector stores
  • Agent orchestration frameworks
  • Enterprise-grade governance and safety controls.
• Act as the founding member of a future AI Product Engineering team, likely taking on the technical leadership role of the team as the platform expands.
• Educate and coach internal squads on safe and effective use of AI tools.

What we are looking for:

Minimum Qualifications (Required)

AI & LLM Engineering

• Strong experience integrating LLMs into production systems.
• Hands-on prompt engineering, guardrails, and hallucination mitigation experience.
• Experience building cloud-native AI services.

Enterprise Backend Engineering

• 8+ years as a senior/principal engineer building large-scale enterprise systems.
• Deep experience with:
  • Java/Spring Boot
  • REST APIs & microservices
  • Kafka or RabbitMQ
  • AWS + Kubernetes + Docker
  • Postgres or MySQL
  • Redis + Elastic

Fintech /Payments Expertise (Required)

• Experience with:
  • Deep understanding of the end to end payments processing workflows. 
  • Reconciliation flows.
  • Merchant onboarding & KYB/KYC.
  • Settlement & payouts.
  • Exception handling.
  • Payment methods across multiple channels
    

Security, Governance & Compliance

• Understanding of:
  • PCI DSS boundaries
  • GDPR & data privacy
  • Audit logging & traceability
  • Sensitive document handling.
    
    
    

Preferred Qualifications (Nice to Have)

• LangGraph experience (agent orchestration)
• LangChain / RAG systems
• Vector DB experience (PGVector, Pinecone, Weaviate)
• Multi-agent orchestration
• Model fine-tuning or retrieval-augmented fine-tuning
• Python experience for AI workflows
• Experience scaling AI systems in production environments
  
  
  
  

Behavioral Competencies

• High ownership and bias for action —comfortable delivering value fast.
• Comfortable dealing with ambiguity and seeking clarity as a senior engineering lead.
• Strong communication skills to bridge Business, Product, Platform, Ops, and Engineering.
• Systems thinker with the ability to simplify complexity.
• Low-ego collaborator who can influence and drive change without necessarily leaning on authority.
• Thrives in an environment balancing speed with compliance and accuracy.
  
  
  
  

Success Metrics

Operational KPIs

• Reconciliation automation rate (% of AI automatically reconciled payments)
• Reconciliation coverage rate (% coverage across payment methods)
• Ops workload reduction (% fewer manual tasks)
• Error reduction in reconciliation
• Exception handling turnaround time
• Onboarding time reduction (hours/days → minutes)

Product KPIs

• Merchant activation rate increase
• Faster reconciliation cycles
• Improved extraction accuracy (precision/recall)
• Business outcomes:  Revenue generated/net CAPEX and OPEX savings from AI automation.

Platform KPIs

• Adoption of AI product features/ agents by internal product squads
• AI service reliability, latency, and cost efficiency
• Time-to-value: PoC in 45 days, production in 90days.

Why this role matters? 

AI represents a significant opportunity to transform high-cost, high-volume operational workflows in payments. By automating reconciliation, onboarding, exception handling, intelligent payment routing e.t.c, this role directly accelerates merchant activation, reduces operational load, strengthens compliance, and unlocks faster payment scaling.

This Principal AI & Product Engineer will be the architect, builder, and future leader
of our AI product engineering and automation strategy, laying the foundation for the world-class AI platform that will power the next phase of Cellulant’s growth.

Why Work for Us?

At Cellulant, we are more than a payments company: we are bridge-builders. We believe that by simplifying the way people pay and get paid, we are connecting companies to their ambitions, people to opportunities, and Africa to the global economy. Our work goes beyond payments—it’s about what people, businesses, and communities can do when the movement of money becomes more dependable, seamless, and secure. 

Some exciting things about us...

• We have an extensive footprint: We have an office presence in 10 countries, and our products serve 24 countries across Africa, with a global workforce of about 300 employees. 
• We believe innovation is at the heart of Fintech: Thousands of market leaders and top enterprises trust our technology to power their payments. Our customers are in various sectors, including financial services, travel and hospitality, telecom, e-commerce, remittance companies, SaaS, and the gig economy. 
• We support a diverse and inclusive workforce: We focus on the growth and development of our employees through well-developed, individualised career paths, ensuring you reach your full potential in a supportive and delivery-oriented environment. 
• We put our employees first: At Cellulant, your contribution is rewarded competitively. We use clear career levels and role titles, and benchmark our base pay against data and a well-established internal process. Your actual salary will reflect your experience, skills, impact and the scope of the role, as well as our business needs and prevailing market conditions. We also offer generous personal time off, and medical and life insurance benefits (markets permitting).
• We seek collaborative builders: At Cellulant, we believe that great ideas happen when we come together. Therefore, we nurture a collaborative work environment that challenges, engages, and empowers each person to contribute to the growth and success of the business. 
• We solve Africa's digital economy: We’re solving payment challenges on the continent to create opportunities and accelerate economic growth for all of Africa.