Technical Team Lead – Software Engineering at MultiChoice

Key Performance Objectives

Software Engineering 

• Provide direction and clarity on all technical aspects of software development.
• Oversee the design and development of software applications.
• 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 practices, and guidelines.
• Standardization 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

• Manage and maintain documentation related to the day-to-day operations, i.e. Standard Operating Procedures (SOP)
• 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.

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.

Stakeholder Management 

• Develop and maintain relationships with key stakeholders across the business
• 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.

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 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.
• Interview and recruit new members of the team.
• 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 Program and ensure that continued poor performance is appropriately dealt with.

Governance, Risk and Compliance    

• Ensure compliance to all applicable processes and policies.
• Drive remediation of risks, issues and deviations of applicable process and policies.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree (NQF 7 and higher) in Software Engineering, Information Technology, Computer Science or a related technical discipline
• Post graduate qualification will be an advantage

Experience

• A minimum of 5-8 years’ experience as a Software Developer, with 2-3 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
• 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