Application Owner - CSTech Risk at Investec

Description

• The Application Owner is responsible for the end-to-end ownership, delivery, and operational management of the Data Integration Platform that supports critical risk, finance, and regulatory capabilities. This role ensures that the platform delivers trusted, high-quality, and timely data to downstream systems while leading the team responsible for data integration, enrichment, and platform operations. The role combines technical platform ownership, people leadership, and stakeholder management to ensure the platform is stable, scalable, and aligned with organisational priorities, including the ongoing data platform modernisation initiative.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the application strategy aligned to business objectives and enterprise architecture.
• Translate business goals into an application roadmap, prioritising initiatives based on value, risk, and resource availability.
• Evaluate the current application landscape and identify opportunities for optimisation, consolidation, or innovation.
• Ensure alignment between application strategy, data strategy, and broader technology strategy.
• Oversee application design to ensure solutions meet business, technical, security, and usability requirements.
• Ensure applications are scalable, resilient, performant, and well-integrated with existing systems.
• Promote best practices in user experience, security-by-design, and architecture standards.
• Review and approve design artefacts to ensure compliance with organisational standards and policies.
• Govern application changes across the full lifecycle, from intake and prioritisation to implementation and post-release review.
• Ensure change is delivered in a controlled manner, minimising risk to service continuity.
• Collaborate with business and technical teams to define and validate change requirements.
• Ensure appropriate testing, documentation, and change approvals are completed.
• Accountable for the day-to-day operational performance and availability of the application.
• Ensure incidents, problems, and service requests are managed effectively and within agreed SLAs.
• Monitor application health, performance, and stability, driving continuous service improvement.
• Coordinate with support teams and vendors to resolve operational issues.
• Ensure application data is managed in line with organisational data governance standards.
• Support data quality, integrity, security, and appropriate access controls.
• Ensure compliance with data-related regulations, policies, and retention requirements.
• Collaborate with data owners, analysts, and governance bodies to support reliable reporting and insights.
• Own and manage the application budget, including run costs, enhancement spend, and licensing.
• Forecast and track costs, ensuring spend is controlled and delivers value for money.
• Support business cases for investments, upgrades, and enhancements.
• Identify opportunities for cost optimisation without compromising service quality.
• Ensure applications comply with relevant legal and regulatory requirements, including GDPR and POPIA.
• Manage contractual obligations related to vendors, software licenses, and third-party services.
• Work with Legal and Procurement teams to assess risk and ensure compliant engagements.
• Ensure intellectual property and data protection obligations are understood and enforced.
• Ensure appropriate resourcing is in place to support application operations and delivery of the roadmap.
• Coordinate internal teams and external partners to meet service and change demands.
• Identify skill gaps and support capability development where required.
• Balance operational stability with delivery demands.
• Act as the primary point of contact for application-related matters.
• Build and maintain strong relationships with business stakeholders, IT teams, and vendors.
• Manage expectations through clear communication, prioritisation, and transparent decision-making.
• Facilitate effective governance, reporting, and escalation where required.

Qualifications, Experience and Skills

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, Information Systems, or a related field.
• A postgraduate qualification is advantageous.
• Relevant Microsoft Azure certifications and/or data management certifications are beneficial.
• 10+ years' total experience in data, analytics, or software engineering, including at least 5 years in senior or leadership roles within data engineering or platform delivery (flexible based on role requirements).
• Extensive hands-on experience with Microsoft Azure data services, including data storage, data processing, orchestration, ingestion, transformation, and curation technologies.
• Proven experience delivering enterprise-scale data platforms and data products, ideally within financial services or banking environments.
• Experience working with Platform as a Service (PaaS) architectures in Azure.
• Practical experience implementing Infrastructure as Code, automation, and scripting within cloud environments.
• Experience using Azure DevOps, GitHub, or equivalent CI/CD and source control platforms.
• Demonstrated experience providing technical leadership, including setting engineering standards, reviewing solution designs, and mentoring engineers and analysts.
• Strong experience engaging and managing stakeholders across multiple business domains.
• Strong programming proficiency in C#, Python, and T‑SQL.
• Advanced data modelling and design capabilities, including dimensional modelling, Data Vault, and domain‑driven data models to support both operational and analytical use cases.
• Solid understanding of data virtualisation, data warehousing, and lakehouse architectures.
• Familiarity with common business intelligence and reporting tools.
• Strong ability to balance technical excellence with business outcomes.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and influencing skills in complex environments.