Lead Software Developer (Team Leadership, Architecture, CI/CD)

A financial services business in Johannesburg is looking for a hands‑on lead to take its software development team forward. You’ll set the technical direction, stay close to the code, and grow the developers around you — reporting to the head of engineering.

It’s a role with two halves that have to work together: the engineering half — architecture, standards, CI/CD and the quality of what ships — and the people half — mentoring, feedback, workload and keeping a team pulling in one direction. You’ll also be the person sitting between the business and the technology when tech debt and architectural change need arguing for.

What you’ll do

• Lead the development team day to day — objectives, roles, workload and delivery milestones.
• Mentor and develop the engineers around you, with regular feedback and honest performance conversations.
• Design scalable, modular system architectures, and choose and evolve the technologies that fit them.
• Set and enforce coding standards, run thorough code reviews, and own the quality of what ships.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for automated testing and deployment.
• Take part in product meetings across the business and contribute to delivery planning.
• Spot delivery and technical risk early, and resolve the problems that surface mid-build.
• Build security and data protection into the development lifecycle rather than bolting it on afterwards.
• Allocate people well, so projects land without burning the team out.

What you’ll need

• At least 5 years’ experience as a software developer, with product you have actually delivered.
• Experience leading a team.
• A strong command of the SDLC, SOLID principles and software design patterns.
• Proficiency in a modern language such as Java, C#, Python or JavaScript, and in object-oriented design.
• API design and development, Git source control, and unit testing frameworks.
• Containerisation technologies.
• SQL and NoSQL databases — design, querying and query optimisation.
• Matric, plus a tertiary degree or diploma.

Nice to have

• Cloud platforms — AWS, Azure or Google Cloud — including storage, compute and serverless architectures.
• Agile delivery — Scrum or Kanban — and DevOps practice.
• Test-driven development and pair programming.
• Secure coding and vulnerability assessment.
• Performance tuning – finding the bottleneck and fixing it.
• Project tracking tools such as Jira or Azure DevOps.

What’s on offer

• Real technical authority — the stack, the patterns and the standards are yours to set.
• A team to build and grow, with a mandate to develop them properly rather than in name only.
• Hybrid working, based in Johannesburg.
• A permanent role reporting straight into architecture and engineering leadership.

Johannesburg. Hybrid. Permanent.

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