Senior Development Engineer (Customer Operations/AI Agents)

You’ll own them end to end, from designing how they reason and which tools and data they can use, to the evaluation, guardrails and observability that keep them accurate, on-brand and safe in production.

You’ll work closely with our Sales and CS leaders and the agents who use these tools on the front line, so you can see the impact of your work in conversion, response times and customer satisfaction. This is a hands-on role for someone who wants to move LLM-powered systems past the demo stage and into something thousands of customers rely on.

Senior engineers here are not heads-down implementers. You'll:

Regularly ship meaningful improvements to production

About AnyVan

Got Drive? Join AnyVan as we make moving anything, anywhere miles better and build a career that moves just as fast.

Back in 2009, our Chairman Angus saw half-empty vans everywhere and knew there had to be a better way! That's how AnyVan began. He set out to create the world's most efficient logistics technology and help halve the number of wasted miles by filling those empty vans.

Since then we've become the nation's favourite way to move, with over 150k five-star reviews and 5 million customers in the UK and Europe. Our team of 400 AnyVanners across London, Cape Town and Bogota is proving that moving doesn't have to cost the earth by helping save 8,520 tonnes of Carbon each year.

We're embedding AI and machine learning across our core platform, not as experiments, but as production systems that drive real business outcomes:

Real-time, intelligent pricing

We're product-led and agile. Most teams run Scrum with two-week sprints, but we care far more about outcomes than rituals. Engineers are trusted to challenge assumptions, adapt processes, and ship things that matter.

Have fun, get it done

Progress over perfection

One team thinking big

You can find out more about our Company, Culture and Values here:

General FAQ's

We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse workplace where every voice is heard, every perspective is valued, and every individual has the opportunity to thrive. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds to be part of our mission and contribute to our vibrant culture.

Responsibilities

• that models true job-level costs and responds dynamically to supply, demand, and market conditions
• Predictive demand and routing models that forecast driver availability and optimise job allocation before a customer even books LLM-powered tooling across our internal and customer-facing products, from intelligent quoting to driver workflow automation A two-sided marketplace where drivers can buy and sell jobs to maximise utilisation — powered by smart matching algorithms
• We’re looking for a senior engineer to help build and scale the AI agents behind our Sales and Customer Service teams. These agents handle real conversations with real customers every day, answering questions, qualifying leads, quoting moves and resolving issues across phone, chat and messaging.
• How our engineering teams deliver
• Work closely with product, data, and commercial stakeholders
• Influence technical direction and architectural decisions
• Balance speed with long-term sustainability

Designing, building, and operating production-grade systems that scale

• Tackling complex technical challenges across backend, infrastructure, data flows, and AI/ML pipelines
• Writing clean, pragmatic, well-tested code with long-term maintainability in mind
• Collaborating with technical and non-technical stakeholders to shape solutions
• Championing testing, observability, and quality improvements
• Mentoring engineers and raising the technical bar across the team

Requirements

• Go, Rust, React, Node.js
• Java, PHP, Angular
• You don't need experience in everything, we value strong fundamentals and good engineering judgement over keyword matching.
• You'll thrive here if you have

Experience in a scale-up or fast-growing product environment

• Strong backend engineering skills (Go, Java, Python, or similar)
• A solid understanding of distributed systems, scalability, and performance
• Experience with CI/CD, modern deployment practices, and cloud infrastructure

Comfort working with ambiguity and evolving requirements

• A bias toward action — shipping value quickly, then iterating
• A collaborative mindset and the ability to influence beyond your code
• Cape Town -based, able to commute to the Central Business District

Preferred

• exposure to AI/ML systems, marketplaces, logistics, pricing, or e-commerce

Benefits

• at least 3 days per week
• 20 days +public holidays and Christmas Eve on us
• ZAR1000 pr month towards cover with Momentum/Discovery
• Future Ready -
• 5% you, 5% us
• Easy Travel -
• Free parking or transport home after 7pm
• Daily Perks -

In-house barista coffee, free breakfast every day

• Weekly drinks, fun socials, and rewards that take you places (literally - last winners hit the Alps)
• Join a disruptive technology leader and fast forward your career move

Our technology

We're pragmatic and cloud-first, running on AWS, with the flexibility to choose the right tool for the job:

Fully eligible to work in South Africa

Our Careers Page