Technical Lead - AI Enablement Squad

Discovery – Health| Data Science Lab

Technical Lead – AI Enablement Squad 

About Discovery 

Discovery’s core purpose is to make people healthier and to enhance and protect their lives. We seek out and invest in exceptional individuals who understand and support our core purpose, and whose own values align with those of Discovery. Our fast-paced and dynamic environment enables smart, self-driven people to be their best. As global thought leaders, Discovery is passionate about innovating in order to not only achieve financial success, but to ignite positive and meaningful change within our society.

About Data Science Lab

The Group Data Science Lab (DS Lab) is expanding, and we’re looking for talented individuals to join our growing team. Our global team collaborates with partners such as Discovery Health Digital, Quantium, Risk Intelligence, and renowned institutions like the London School of Economics (LSE). Working across diverse areas—including digital, clinical, wellness, and behavioral themes—we harness terabytes of structured and unstructured data using a modern big data architecture. The DS Lab also embraces a forward-thinking approach, identifying new data sources and opportunities and leveraging the Vit.AI platform, we create scalable, fit-for-purpose solutions that serve the business well into the future. 

About AI Enablement

The AI Enablement team is the engineering engine that transforms cutting-edge data science into tangible value for our members and business. We bridge experimental AI and robust, enterprise-scale production systems, enabling scalable, reliable, and efficient AI solutions.

Key Purpose

The AI Enablement Squad Technical Lead is a senior hands‑on leader responsible for translating cutting‑edge data science into robust, scalable, production‑grade AI systems. The role provides deep technical leadership across the productionisation of machine learning and LLM solutions, with a strong emphasis on advanced Python engineering, sound software and systems architecture, and engineering excellence.

This role is accountable for technical design, implementation quality, and architectural integrity across AI-enabled systems, working closely with data scientists, engineers, and platform teams. The role acts as a technical authority and mentor, guiding engineering decisions, reviewing critical code, and supporting the growth of junior and mid-level technical team members.

The position involves hands-on ownership of the end-to-end technical lifecycle—from system and data pipeline design, through build, testing, deployment, and production monitoring. Success in this role requires architecting and implementing maintainable, resilient, and scalable systems, integrating effectively with existing enterprise platforms, and ensuring alignment with Group development, security, and governance standards.

Key outputs

The successful applicant will be responsible for but not limited to the following job functions:

Areas of responsibility may include but not limited to

Hands on Technical Leadership & Mentorship

• Act as a senior hands-on technical lead and principal engineer, contributing directly to critical production Python codebases.
• Provide technical mentorship and guidance to junior and mid-level engineers through code reviews, pairing, and architectural discussions.
• Set and uphold high standards for code quality, testing, reliability, and maintainability, fostering a culture of engineering excellence.

Production Python & Systems Architecture

• Lead the technical design and implementation of production-grade AI systems, with a strong emphasis on advanced Python engineering.
• Design and influence system and application architecture for model deployment, inference services, data pipelines, and integrations.
• Make pragmatic architectural decisions balancing scalability, resilience, performance, cost, and time-to-value, in alignment with Discovery’s enterprise and security standards.

MLOps / LLMOps & Operational Excellence

• Design, implement, and evolve production ML and LLM workflows, including deployment, monitoring, and lifecycle management.
• Champion best practices in CI/CD, automated testing, observability, and incident analysis for AI-enabled systems.
• Ensure AI systems are observable, resilient, and supportable in production environments.

Cross functional Technical Collaboration

• Work closely with data scientists to translate experimental and research work into production-ready systems.
• Collaborate with platform and infrastructure teams to ensure solutions integrate cleanly with existing enterprise platforms.
• Provide clear technical input on feasibility, constraints, and trade-offs to business and technical stakeholders.

Technical Influence & Enablement

• Influence the technical direction and sustainability of AI delivery across the organisation through shared patterns, tooling, and architectural guidance.
• Drive the adoption of agreed engineering standards, platforms, and best practices for AI productionisation.
• Represent the AI Enablement Squad as a technical authority in architecture and engineering forums, contributing to group-wide technical capability uplift.

Personal Attributes

The successful candidate would need to have the following competencies:

• Collaborative mentor with a natural inclination to share knowledge.
• Pragmatic and results-driven, focused on delivering robust solutions.
• Intellectually curious with a passion for technology and innovation.
• Excellent communicator, able to articulate complex technical ideas clearly.
• Ownership mindset with resilience and adaptability.

Skills

• Levels of proficiency in Python, SQL and cloud-native development to enable management of the delivery team
• Similarly, for MLOps/LLMOps tools (e.g. MLflow, Kubeflow, LangChain, etc.), as well as CI/CD, containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure-as-code
• Advanced knowledge of cloud platforms (either GCP, AWS or Azure)
• Agile delivery

Education and Experience

The following requirements are Essential:

• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field
• 6+ years in software/data engineering or AI productionisation
• 8+ years, with leadership experience in cross-functional technical teams

   The following requirements are advantageous:

• Postgraduate qualification in AI, Data Science, or Systems Engineering

EMPLOYMENT EQUITY   
                             
The Company’s approved Employment Equity Plan and Targets will be considered as part of the recruitment process. As an Equal Opportunities employer, we actively encourage and welcome people with various disabilities to apply.