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.