Head of AI & Technology

Cape Town (hybrid) · Permanent appointment · Senior leadership role

The next generation of knowledge firms won't bolt AI onto how they already work. They will be designed for it from the ground up. Help us design ours.

Meridian Economics is hiring a Head of AI & Technology to help create that future: transforming Meridian into an AI-native consultancy where exceptional human judgement is amplified by intelligent systems. You will shape how our people and AI work together — and build and own the technology platform at the heart of our firm.

About Meridian Economics

Meridian Economics is a boutique energy-economics consultancy and think-tank at the centre of South Africa’s power-sector transition. We publish the SA Power Market Report, a subscription market-intelligence data and information product built on COMPASS, our power-system modelling suite; we deliver high-value bespoke advisory to investors, developers, banks and large energy users; and we produce independent, philanthropically funded public-interest research that shapes national energy policy. We are a eleven-person (plus associates) team about to double in size — and we intend to grow our impact much faster than our headcount. That is where you come in.

The role

This is not a conventional technology leadership role. We offer a senior strategic seat at the centre of Meridian, working directly with the Managing Director (MD) and the leadership team. Your mandate is twofold: to continuously reimagine how Meridian should operate as AI capabilities advance, and to own the secure technology backbone on which the firm runs today, and into the future. As AI reshapes the economics of expert work — turning an analyst-week into an afternoon, and bespoke assignments into scalable products — you will design and then build what a small, elite consultancy can become. You will do this empirically: running experiments and prototypes continuously, keeping what demonstrably works for Meridian and discarding what does not. You will own three connected accountabilities:

• AI transformation and operating-model reinvention — own our AI strategy with the leadership team and stay at the leading edge of AI developments. Your job is to move us well beyond today’s use cases: translate the frontier into how we research, model, write, review and deliver; build our knowledge base, model operations and AI workflows into capabilities that are genuinely cutting-edge and genuinely useful; and grow AI fluency across a team of exacting experts.

• New products and services — co-conceptualise AI-enabled offerings with our technical heads (you bring what is technically possible; they bring the domain depth), and build, run and evolve the production platforms behind our subscription products — the data pipelines, dashboards, data viewers and subscriber-facing tools around COMPASS, and the compute environment our models run on (the platform around the model, not the model itself).

• Integrated systems and business insight — set the target architecture that replaces our fragmented internal systems (finance, timesheets, customer relationship management (CRM), project and contract management, reporting) with one coherent whole — a single source of truth that turns what we know about ourselves into leadership insight. Where appropriate you direct rather than build: implementation of the consolidation and day-to-day infrastructure operations can be outsourced under your architecture and standards.

You will be the architect of this transformation, working closely with two partners: the Head of Operations, who defines the operating problems and owns adoption and change management while you own architecture and delivery; and our technical heads, who own the science while you industrialise how it is produced and delivered to clients. Commodity IT and infrastructure operations can be outsourced, under your accountability, so that you stay focused on AI, products and strategy.

Who we are looking for

A senior technologist-strategist — not a systems administrator, and not a pure researcher — and not just a strategist either. You came up through the ranks as a builder, with years of hands-on development and delivery behind you, and in recent years you have gone deep into AI. You might currently be an AI or data leader in a professional-services or analytics business, a senior engineer or Chief Technology Officer (CTO) from a small technology firm or start-up, or a digital-transformation leader in a knowledge-intensive organisation. We expect to find you already doing interesting things. The full combination we describe here — deep technical AI skill, product-innovation experience and leadership weight — is rare. If you are strong in two of the three, with the appetite and clear potential to grow the third, we want to hear from you.

What the role demands:

• Deep practical AI fluency — large language model (LLM) workflows, agentic automation and data engineering as things you build, not concepts you present.

• Architecture and product judgement — you design coherent systems, make pragmatic build-versus-buy calls, and instinctively aim at commercially relevant products rather than technically elegant ones.

• Strategic weight — you can hold your own in a leadership-level debate about the future of a firm and help to shape that future.

• Player-coach range — in a small but growing firm you will prototype hands-on one day and set direction the next, excelling in both.

• Earn expert trust — build credibility with economists, engineers and modellers who are persuaded by evidence — bring clear thinking, practical demonstrations and technology that delivers.

• Rigour where it matters — client confidentiality, data security and reproducibility are non-negotiable in our business.

You need not know the energy sector, but you will be intellectually strong enough to understand our work quickly and to see, before we do, what AI makes possible.

What we offer

A canvas very few technologists are offered: the mandate to help reinvent how an entire firm works, in a business small enough to transform and prominent enough for the results to show at national scale. In a market undergoing its biggest structural shift in a century, you will sit at the leadership table of one of South Africa’s most influential energy-economics firms, setting the benchmark for what an AI-native professional firm looks like. Meridian aims to be a laboratory for what knowledge work becomes. The package is competitive, structured as a solid base with a performance component that recognises the AI impact you create, and we will discuss remuneration expectations openly in our first conversation. The position is based at our Cape Town office, with hybrid flexibility.