Development Practice Lead at The Shoprite Group of Companies

Purpose of the Job    
As a recognized software engineering authority with effective leadership capability, the Development Practice Lead is responsible to lead and drive software engineering practices across all of Shoprite’s design and development teams, continuously improve software engineering standards, and lead agile ways of working and setting, and enforcing software engineering standards for design and development work products. The Development Practice Lead role is responsible to create, lead, manage, and mentoring a practice of highly skilled Software Engineers across the delivery organization.

Job Objectives    
Lead the establishment and growth of multiple Communities of Practices (CoP) for software engineering work products and practices.
Cultivate an agile mindset and lead the adoption of new development ways of working and the related toolsets to empower teams to move towards self-managing and high-performing agile delivery teams.
Lead quality reviews of design and development work products.
Recruit and onboard designers and developers and provide coaching, mentoring, and training to continuously improve their skills levels.
Qualifications    
Essential
Minimum of 2 years management or other equivalent leadership experience of technology teams

Desirable
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Management Information Systems or a related field, or equivalent work experience or 3-year tertiary qualification in a relevant discipline, e.g. computer science or engineering or computer science related technical certification with 2+ years’ proven people management experience.
Experience    
Essential
10+ years of working experience within the IT industry.
5+ years of Microsoft .NET and C# programming experience in a mainstream programming language like Microsoft.Net, C#, JAVA, ABAP, etc.
3+ years of Experience in Cloud Services (Azure, AWS, Google).
2+ years of Experience with recruiting talented team members.
5+ years of Experience with Agile software development life-cycle principles.
2+ years of Experience with creating career development paths and managing the career development of individuals.
3+ years of Experience in the Identification and formulation of Language, Standard, Artifacts, Tools, and Processes.
5+ years of demonstrated expertise in a variety of application development methodologies and practices (including agile and waterfall).
5+ years of demonstrated expertise in a variety of application Design methodologies and practices for medium to large enterprises.
5+ years of Excellent technical development and design skills with the ability to be able to mentor others to improve their skills.

Desirable
3+ years of experience with all aspects of IT projects from business analysis, architectures, system analysis, and design through development, testing, implementation, and production (SDLC) and how DevOps interact with this in the Cloud.
2-3 years of Retail industry experience with an understanding of retail business processes would be advantageous.
Knowledge and Skills    
Essential
• In-depth knowledge of the Systems Development Life Cycle
• Advanced influencing, interpersonal and communication skills are required to contract with, engage and influence senior leaders and technical specialists, as well as coordinate complex initiatives across a number of teams.
• Proven ability to establish and manage relationships with various individuals at differing levels of the business. These include, but are not limited to senior leaders, technical specialists, and support staff.
• Ability to build effective relationships and build a strong and positive team.
• Developed people management skills that are critical to service a number of cross-functional needs, including people with strong academic backgrounds and technical skills.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and logical skills with attention to detail.
• Excellent team-working, interpersonal skills.
• Delivery of compelling presentations to all levels of stakeholders and excellent communication and relationship-building skills.
• Develop proposals and excellent written communication & presentation skills.
• Excellent organization and facilitation skills.
• Strong conflict management skills.
• UI Design design methodologies.
• Experience using and managing a wide range of software development languages, databases, tools, and methodologies.
• Design and Development for Cloud solutions in AWS or Azure or Google Cloud.
• API integration (on-premise and cloud).
• Ability to manage multiple initiatives simultaneously.
• Focused on doing things correctly rather than quickly.