Staff Engineer at Salt South Africa

• We are looking for a Staff Engineer to take on a critical technical leadership role across the customer journey – from browsing and product discovery to checkout, pricing, payments and user engagement.
• In this role, you’ll act as an architectural leader across multiple eCommerce squads, partnering closely with Product, Design, and Engineering Managers. You’ll guide technical direction, shape the future platform architecture, and mentor engineers as the company transitions from legacy systems into a modern, cloud-native ecosystem.
• This is an opportunity to make an immediate impact on a platform undergoing major technical evolution.

What You’ll Be Working On

• Providing technical leadership and architectural direction across core eCommerce domains
• Designing modern, cloud‑native, serverless and event‑driven systems
• Contributing to a headless frontend engineering stack using modern frameworks (e.g., Next.js, React, TypeScript)
• Driving creation of high-quality technical artefacts: ADRs, system designs, diagrams, architectural patterns
• Improving developer experience, CI/CD, observability and reliability
• Collaborating daily with Product & Design to deliver customer‑centric solutions
• Mentoring engineers, resolving architectural debates and ensuring alignment across squads
• Contributing to long-term migration and modernisation initiatives

Tech Environment

• Frontend: React, TypeScript, modern headless frameworks
• Backend: Node.js, Python, Java
• Cloud: AWS serverless (Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, SQS/SNS), microservices, event‑driven patterns
• Infrastructure: Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, containerisation
• Architecture: Microservices, distributed systems, MACH principles, edge‑based rendering

What We’re Looking For

• Strong engineering leadership with experience influencing multiple teams
• Track record architecting scalable distributed systems
• Experience working across eCommerce components (catalog, checkout, payments, content, user journeys)
• Proficiency in cloud-native and serverless architecture
• Ability to communicate technical decisions clearly to engineers, product teams, and stakeholders
• Comfortable mentoring, guiding technical choices, and improving engineering practices

Bonus:

• Experience with MACH/headless commerce
• Experience modernising legacy architectures at scale