Mr D - Engineering Manager at takealot.com

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

• Guide team development efforts towards successful delivery
• Provide technical leadership to team members through coaching and mentorship
• Enforce high standards of software quality within the team by establishing good practices and habits
• Identify and encourage areas for growth and improvement within the team
• Collaborate with other software developers, technical product managers, product owners, and business owners to plan, design, develop, test, and maintain business applications.
• Assist in the collection and documentation of user requirements, development of user stories, estimates, and work plans
• Prepare reports, manuals, and other documentation on the status, operation, and maintenance of software
• Ensure that the team builds applications in accordance with agreed best practices and standards around security, scalability, operations, and testing.
• Participate in peer-reviews of solution designs and related code Develop, refine, and tune integrations between applications
• Analyze and resolve technical and application problems
• Assess opportunities for application and process improvement and prepare documentation of rationale to share with team members and other affected parties
• Communicate with leadership regarding progress against plans, issues, and needs Work with other team leads to leverage targeted technologies, processes, standards, and methodologies
• Conduct regular 1:1 meetings with each assigned team member to assist with issues and provide mentoring support
• Serve as an integral part of the recruitment team for open positions within the team
• Provide performance input of assigned team members for the performance enhancement review process
• Develop and maintain strong relationships with key stakeholders outside of your area
• Strong driver to identify and improve key areas for engineering staff retention
• Influences team to adopt current company technology standards
• Ensure your team implements on-call rotations and manages their operations effectively
• Enables the team to reduce tech debt, automate mundane work, reduce hot desk workload, and build systems for success

 The skills we need:

• A solutions-oriented, can-do attitude and high-energy
• Strong analytical and critical thinking, using data to inform decisions
• Capability to present ideas succinctly, in writing and verbally
• Passion for learning new skills and appreciation for inventing and simplifying
• A curious thinker who understands technical topics beyond the average reader
• Comfortable with rapidly changing and/or loosely defined requirements that are refined over time
• Thorough understanding of computer science fundamentals, OO concepts, data structures, and algorithms

Qualifications & Experience:

• At least 5 years experience in software engineering, with at least 2 years in a leadership role
• Degree in Computer Science or Engineering or equivalent experience
• Experience leading and managing a team of engineers on complex software projects
• Experience influencing a team of developers to deliver highly available and scalable solutions
• Experience designing or architecting (design patterns, reliability, and scaling) new and existing systems
• Experience with stateless architecture design, microservices, and the understanding of the strengths and weaknesses thereof
• Experience with full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations
• Experience with cloud service providers like GCP/AWS and development in a *nix environment
• Strong hands-on experience in Python development, with a mindset for developing optimized code
• Experience with creating APIs and using databases (relational & non-relational)