Senior Manager Software Engineering at MultiChoice

Key Performance Objectives

Software Development Strategy

•  Translate operational business requirements into technical needs and actions.
• Determine the appropriate platforms, systems, tools, skills and approach, within the context of EBS architectural guidelines.
• Provide practical insights for strategic technology decisions.
• Prepare all technical business proposals.
• Ensure key software development principles, best practises, methodologies, and trends are adopted and adhered to within, but not limited to the scope of the following:
• Deliver incremental product transformational value
• Fail early, course correction
• User expectation focus
• Product Owner “Central” approach
• Foundational approach
• Plan for mistakes
• Parallel development
• Automation/no code
• Adaptive approach to business “Way of work”
• Drive DevOps implementation
• Define strategies for Design, Coding, Testing, Release, Maintenance, and technical debt remediation.
• Ensure consistent approach to the transformation of architectural plans and designs into high quality software.
• Provide input into the technology roadmap.

Software Engineering    

•  Provide direction and clarity on all technical aspects of software development.
• Oversee the design and development of software applications.
• Drive the achievement of the strategic and operational intent of the discipline and department.
• Direct the work of subordinates in delivering high quality application systems and components on time.
• Manage the day-to-day software engineering activities of subordinates including development, testing, debugging, maintaining application systems and documentation.
• Provide a solid understanding of in-use technologies in high scale environments.
• Provide technical leadership to subordinates.
• Ensure consistency in adherence to software engineering principles, best practises, and guidelines.
• Standardisation of technologies, approaches, and architectures across teams in a functional competency according to prescribed architectures to facilitate reuse and mobility of team members, and to increasingly respond better to change.
• Drive architectural changes in current and future projects.
• Resolve production issues timeously and efficiently by providing technical leadership and ownership across various remediation forums.
• Take ownership of key work streams and work packages when called for, by playing the role of “Delivery Owner”.
• Support technical operations & integrations work streams including contributing to the activities as called upon by application support teams.

Process Improvement   

•  Actively monitor software development & testing and delivery processes and ensure continuous improvement thereof.
• Ensure that the correct processes and methodologies are followed consistently.
• Build a continuous-improvement culture within software development teams.
• Drive engineering initiatives to improve best practices and streamlined software delivery while striving for continuous improvement.
• Implement remedial actions where necessary.

Stakeholder Management             

•  Provide specialised and technical support to internal and external stakeholders to ensure achievement of functional and organisational objectives.
• Establish and maintain healthy, diverse internal and external relationships and implement remedial actions where required, in the achievement of organisational goals.
• Facilitate cross-team initiatives with Product Owners, Project Managers, and other Development teams.

Reporting        

•  Provision of timely and accurate reports in accordance with business and management requirements.
• Regular cadence reporting to line manager on issues, statuses, and progress and software development initiatives.
• Report on status, risk and timelines regarding operational delivery to provide visibility and line of sight.
• Report on Software development activities and key performance & delivery metrics of the discipline.

People Management     

•  Define approach for upskilling, coaching, mentoring, and knowledge sharing within the discipline
• Care Management in terms of building highly cross functional teams
• Drive innovation and innovative thinking
• Manage multiple squads and team members, set targets and goals in a functional competency.
• Oversee and ensure the training and development of software engineering team.
• Manage offshore/external engineering resources.
• Plan capacity for effective delivery.
• Provide mentorship and inspiration to teams.
• Provide regular performance and engagement guidance and feedback to subordinates.
• Drive knowledge transfer and cross skilling between team members.
• Drive a culture of personal quality and accountability.
• Conduct staff meetings, engagement sessions to maintain departmental standards.
• Attend team meetings (stand-ups, planning sessions, etc.) .
• Liaise with the line manager and Product Owners to resolve team impediments.
• Interview and recruit new members of the team, including determining appropriate compensation levels with input from Human Capital.
• Create effective workforce and recruitment demand plans to ensure that current and future business requirements can be met.
• When required, initiate disciplinary processes for team members with support from HC when required.
• Resolve grievances raised by team members.
• Develop a high performing team by embedding formal performance management process and informal coaching.
• Address poor performance of any team member through the formal Performance Improvement Programme and ensure that continued poor performance is appropriately dealt with.

Budget Management    

•  Provide input into departmental budgeting process
• Budget planning for
• Tools
• Platforms
• Training
• Resourcing and Recruitment
• Software Engineering costs
• Debt Remediation
• Innovation
• Financial Reporting
• Ensure that delivery is within budgetary constraints.
• Review and authorise invoices and payments in line with approved budgets and policies.
• Sign-off and approve timesheets of service providers.

Governance, Risk and Compliance

•  Regular attendance and participation at Governance, Risk & Compliance and Audit meetings.
• Ensure compliance to all applicable processes and policies.
• Drive remediation of risks, issues and deviations of applicable process and policies.
• Drive audits, risk management and reporting.

Qualifications

• Post Graduate Degree (NQF 8 and higher)  in Software Engineering, Information Technology, Computer Science or a related technical discipline

Experience

• A minimum of 8-10 years’ experience as a Software Developer, with 3-5 years’ experience in a technical leadership position
• Proven experience with software architecture principles and the ability to apply them to design scalable and maintainable systems
• Experience in monitoring and logging tools such as Grafana, App Dynamics, Splunk, PRTG,
• Experience in unit testing and code quality tools such as SonarQube
• Experience in conducting effective research as well as the ability to analyse, troubleshoot and modify highly complex software systems independently
• Proficient in version control systems like GIT
• Proven track record in driving change successfully through a team by demonstrated by successful project completions, adoption of new technologies and process improvements
• Experience in agile, DevOps development practises
• Experience of working in a high-pressured environment and working to tight deadlines
• Technical expertise and a good understanding of the underlying business processes and systems
• Experience of working with multiple third-party vendors
• Experience in advocating development practices like test-driven development, continuous integration, and continuous deployment
• Experience in working on several successful projects in the web and mobile environment
• Understanding of TOGAF, COBIT, ITIL, UML
• Preferred developments technologies: C#, ASP.NET, HTML, JavaScript, WPF, WCF, Azure DevOps, GIT, REST, JSON, XML, SOAP
• Preferred databases technologies: Oracle, SQL Server, NoSQL variants
• Preferred Platform technologies: AWS, Azure, VMWare, Windows & Linux Servers