Artificial intelligence jobs are starting to appear more frequently on job sites in South Africa, with salaries ranging from R168,000 to R2 million per year.
This is primarily due to the increasing use of artificial intelligence in the South African economy, either as a service provision or to streamline business systems and processes.
South African job site Pnet recently published a job market trends report, revealing that the number of AI professionals securing jobs has nearly doubled since the beginning of 2020.
The bulk of this hiring will be done by information technology companies, followed by the education, finance and consulting sectors.
To find out how much these AI professionals can expect to earn working in South Africa, MyBroadband analyzed various job postings across three job websites.
The highest paying role was Machine Learning Engineer who could earn up to R2 million per year based on experience and qualifications.
Most listings describe a machine learning engineer's core role as supporting data engineers and scientists in developing architectures for cloud and in-house use.
Typical Machine Learning Engineer responsibilities include developing and launching AI-driven tools and building scalable machine learning models using cloud platforms.
Most job postings also require candidates to work with data engineers to process and clean large datasets for training AI models and integrating them into a company's existing systems.
Training requirements for candidates applying for these roles include earning a bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, data science, machine learning, or engineering.
This may not be consistent across all job postings, as some companies may require specific qualifications. However, computer and data science degrees are the most common.
Candidates applying for the Senior Machine Learning Engineer position must have at least five years of experience in machine learning, deep learning, or statistical modeling, depending on the company.
Applicants should also be familiar with languages such as Python, have cloud provider certification, and have experience using the Tensorflow software library.
Less experience required for AI role
Several other AI-related roles are currently open to South African residents, including Prompt Engineer, AI Trainer, and AI Content Creator.
These candidates do not have extensive experience requirements as Machine Learning Engineers and are frequently advertised by international companies recruiting talent in South Africa.
This means compensation is paid in foreign currency, such as dollars, and candidates must work from home. However, a 40-hour work week is not always guaranteed.
For example, one job listing for an AI prompt engineer in Cape Town states that the most successful candidates will work between 5 and 20 hours per week and earn $40 (R753) per hour.
AI prompt engineers create and optimize prompts that guide models to produce specific outputs.
For this position, candidates must be proficient in at least one programming language, such as JavaScript or Python, have “good” writing and grammar skills, and have a bachelor's degree.
Successful candidates will be expected to use the chatbot the company is developing to measure progress and write and evaluate code.
Other commonly mentioned roles in South Africa include AI developers and AI content creators, which have very similar requirements to machine learning engineers.
AI content creator positions do not have the same training or technical requirements as machine learning or prompt engineers, such as programming language proficiency or a computer science degree.
Instead, experience with AI models such as ChatGPT or Claude is required.
However, the compensation is significantly lower compared to AI engineering roles.
For example, a position that requires a new employee to create SEO-friendly blog posts using ChatGPT pays R700 per day, or R14,000 for a 20-day month.
