Senior Engineer (Integration) at Virgin Active South Africa

Job Description

Your Purpose... 

• Is to “change people’s lives for the better through wellness”;
• We deliver social wellness experiences that enable people to meet their personal wellness goals, through holistic physical, mental nutritional and social wellbeing.
• We are passionate about supporting people to lead healthy, fulfilled lives by providing a space where they can focus on their physical, mental and social well-being. Wellness can be confusing. We make it easy, honest, and welcoming for everyone.
• As we transform into a Social Wellness Club, we’re redefining how we approach technology by building globally scalable solutions. A key part of this transformation is consolidating our core member engagement platform (our Mobile App and related services) under a central team. This team will own a unified codebase, enabling faster, more consistent feature rollouts across multiple countries.
• We’re looking for a Senior Integration Engineer to design, build, and evolve the backend and integration services powering our Digital ecosystem and related platforms.
• You’ll be a hands-on senior engineer, delivering reliable, secure, and scalable software across internal and third-party systems, while taking ownership of more complex integration problem spaces through both feature delivery and operational responsibility.
• You’ll work closely with the Engineering Manager / Leads, Product Managers, Designers, QA, and front-end developers to deliver high-quality backend and integration solutions/services that align with our product and business goals.
• This is a hands-on senior engineering role, and you’ll be expected to deliver complex integration work, improve code quality and reliability, strengthen performance and testability, and help drive maintainable, scalable software and engineering practices.
• The role is backend and integration focused, while working closely with front-end teams to support end-to-end delivery.

Your Duties and Responsibilities...

Delivery & Ownership

• Own the design, build, and evolution of complex backend services, APIs, and integration solutions supporting digital products and related platforms.
• Lead technical input into discussions, sprint planning, backlog refinement, and estimation for more complex integration work.
• Support and guide other engineers through high-quality code reviews, knowledge sharing, and strong engineering practices.
• Set a strong example for clean, maintainable, and testable code aligned with team standards and agreed architecture.
• Provide thoughtful code reviews and raise implementation quality through constructive technical feedback.

Technical Execution

• Design, develop, and evolve solutions using C#, .NET, Azure Cloud, and API/event-driven patterns, making sound technical trade-offs for scalability and maintainability.
• Partner with the Engineering Lead to strengthen engineering standards, architectural patterns, and development practices across the team.
• Own delivery across internal platforms and third-party systems for more complex, business-critical, or high-dependency integrations.
• Apply and reinforce strong engineering practices across coding, testing, debugging, code reviews, and secure software development.
• Drive alignment with frontend and other consuming teams to ensure smooth integration design, service contracts, and end-to-end delivery quality.
• Proactively identify and drive improvements in system reliability, performance, observability, and maintainability across owned services and integrations.
• Lead investigation and resolution of complex integration failures, defects, and performance issues across distributed services and partner integrations.
• Improve CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, deployment readiness, and release quality to increase delivery confidence and operational resilience.
• Own the reliability, scalability, and maintainability of integration services through strong technical execution, operational judgment, and proactive improvement.

Operational Excellence

• Lead complex incident resolution, drive root cause analysis, and implement preventative improvements to strengthen system resilience.
• Identify and drive improvements to monitoring, logging, alerting, and observability across integration services.
• Make sound trade-off decisions that balance delivery speed with code quality, maintainability, resilience, and technical debt management.
• Proactively identify risks, dependencies, bottlenecks, and improvement opportunities early, and help drive the right technical response.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner closely with Product Managers and Designers to shape robust technical solutions, surface technical trade-offs, and improve delivery quality.
• Coordinate effectively with QA, Data, Operations, and frontend teams to deliver high-quality features and resolve cross-team technical challenges.
• Communicate progress, technical constraints, trade-offs, and delivery risks clearly, and help drive alignment on the best technical path forward.
• Play a leading role in agile ceremonies, especially for technical estimation, planning, and dependency/risk identification.
• Drive strong engineering documentation, share knowledge proactively, and improve reusable development practices across the team.
• Identify and drive improvements in automated testing, CI/CD, code quality tooling, and developer experience.
• Proactively identify and champion opportunities to reduce technical debt, simplify solutions, and improve delivery speed, quality, and reliability.
• Stay current with engineering practices and Azure best practices and help embed them into team delivery where valuable.

Our Minimum Requirements...

We can’t live without…

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent professional experience.
• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep hands-on experience in backend development and systems integration.
• Strong hands-on experience with C#, .NET, and Azure cloud services in production environments.
• Strong experience building and evolving RESTful APIs, backend services, and integration solutions in Azure Cloud and related integration services.
• Strong understanding of API-led, event-driven, and asynchronous integration patterns, with the ability to apply them to complex integration scenarios.
• Strong understanding of software engineering fundamentals including clean code, testing, debugging, version control, and secure development practices, with consistent application across complex systems.
• Strong exposure to CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, monitoring, and modern software delivery practices, including improvement of team practices.
• Strong ability to troubleshoot and resolve issues across distributed systems, integrations, and third-party dependencies, including complex operational issues.
• Strong experience working with internal and external systems to deliver successful end-to-end integrations, including higher-complexity or business-critical integrations.
• Strong problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively across technical and non-technical teams and influence better technical outcomes.
• Strong experience with Azure integration services such as Service Bus, Logic Apps, Functions, and Event Grid.
• Strong familiarity with Agile/Scrum delivery frameworks and best practices.
• Experience supporting mobile app ecosystems or product-centric digital platforms with complex backend/integration needs.
• Demonstrated experience improving the scalability, reliability, and supportability of backend and integration systems.
• Strong knowledge of enterprise integration patterns and asynchronous messaging systems such as Kafka or RabbitMQ.
• Prior experience working effectively with distributed, remote, or hybrid engineering teams.

Core Interpersonal Skills:

• Emotional Intelligence- proven ability to anticipate the needs of others before they are voiced
• Active Listening- Able to genuinely hear concerns with the ability to defuse tense situations and ensuring members and staff feel heard and valued
• Cultural Awareness and Fluency- understand international norms, etiquette and diverse backgrounds to provide a welcoming environment for our international and VIP members
• Empathy – be able to understand, or and be aware of, someone else’s feelings especially during stressful situations, such as travel delays or billing disputes

Operational & leadership Skills Required:

• Attention to Detail, noticing the small things
• Resilience and Composure, be able to remain calm and optimistic under extreme pressure, during peak or periods or system failures
• Problem solving and conflict resolution – be able to turn challenges into opportunities by thinking and acting quickly to resolve issues before they impact a member’s experience
• Adaptability: be flexible to handle unpredictable shifts in processers, resource changes, last minute VIP guest arrivals, or sudden changes in event plans.
• Relatability – the capacity to connect with diverse stakeholders across all backgrounds
• Situational Awareness – constantly monitoring the environment to identify members who need support or help
• Curiosity- the ability to seek out and transform standard transactions into personalised stories and memorable experiences
• Time Management – the ability to efficiently meet stringent deadlines while maintaining a relaxed and unhurried demeanor for guests.
• Digital Fluency – must be proficient in new age technology and systems

Closing Date 15 April 2026