Department: Engineering
Location: Stellenbosch
Role: Full-time
ABOUT UBUNDI
Ubundi is a South-African venture studio shaping human-centred AI, starting where our roots run deepest.
We build our own products, work with enterprise clients deploying AI into real operations, and run a robotics practice. Across all of it we're after the same thing: AI that amplifies human identity, values and intent instead of flattening them.
Why Work For Us
As part of our founding team you’ll stand at the 0→1 frontier, shipping green-field products with real autonomy, backed by a founder who’s taken companies from garage to global (WooCommerce, Conversio & Cogsy). Expect a bias for shipping over slide-decks, and a front-row seat in writing South Africa’s AI chapter. We’re well-connected enough to open doors worldwide, small enough that your decisions shape the entire studio.
Our Culture
We live the Ubuntu idea: “I am because we are.” That means high trust, radical candor, and respect for life outside the terminal in which we build great things without becoming the product. We prize craft, curiosity, and constructive provocation; we’d rather experiment and learn in daylight than polish in secrecy. Bring your whole self, pull up a chair, and let’s make technology that makes AI more human.
ABOUT THE ROLE
We’re looking for a recent graduate or final-year student who wants to go deep into AI and automation. You’ll be working across our portfolio of AI tools and internal systems, helping us build experiments, workflows, and prototypes that integrate cutting-edge AI capabilities into meaningful user experiences.
You’ll work directly with the founding team (and our world class advisors) to figure out how to deploy AI responsibly and creatively. We care less about what you’ve already done, and more about how you think, how you build, and how fast you can learn.
This is not a formal training program. You’ll learn by building through collaboration, mentorship, and a bias for experimentation. If you’re someone who wants to shape the frontier of tech rather than just follow it, this is for you.
WHAT YOU’LL DO
- Work in a AI-first way for everything you do
- Hands on in architecting and designing early prototypes for technical validation
- Build and deploy AI and automation tools for real-world use cases (internal and customer-facing)
- Design evaluation frameworks to test and improve AI-generated outputs
- Work with large, messy real-world datasets: cleaning, structuring and building the pipelines that make them usable
- Experiment with prompt engineering, agents, workflows, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
- Exhibit a hands-on approach to prototyping, and brainstorming business ideas and technical architectures to deliver them.
YOU MIGHT BE A FIT IF:
- You’re graduating soon or recently finished a degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Math, Information Systems or a related field
- You’ve built things: whether through coursework, side projects, hackathons, or freelance work
- You've used a bunch of different AI tools and gone beyond just playing with them
- You’re a curious builder who likes to figure things out, especially when the path isn’t clear
- You’re process-driven but not afraid to improvise
- You’re comfortable writing and reviewing code, across both frontend and backend systems
- Experience with machine learning, data science, or prompt engineering is a bonus, but not a requirement
WHAT WE OFFER
- Direct exposure to frontier AI work in a small, ambitious team
- Flexibility to work in a way that suits your rhythm (hybrid, with time at our Stellenbosch office encouraged)
- A team culture that values autonomy, creativity, and kindness
- A real chance to shape what AI means in the real world, not just in theory
