Job Opportunities at takealot.com

The position reports to the Head of Product.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

• Building the overall vision and roadmap of the Payments portfolio on all Takealot shopping platforms (web and apps).
• Working cross-functionally with engineering, design, operations, and executive teams to bring about product enhancements that will improve payment-related processes.
• Take responsibility for talks and negotiations with partners dealing with payment services.
• Researching the best solutions in the payments market. Keep up to date with the latest trends and developments and build cases for projects that can move the business forward.
• Drive conversion rate optimization as it relates to online payments.
• Working with business owners to understand their strategy, requirements, and priorities in order to translate their needs into projects for payments.
• Defining/tracking the metrics and data that will inform all decisions on product features and functionality.
• Analyzing and understanding the project scope and core objectives through workshops with stakeholders to define business requirements.
• Eliciting low-level functional requirements and documenting these requirements such that detailed technical specifications can be compiled by Engineering.
• Collaborate with technical lead and subject matter experts to establish the technical vision and analyse trade-offs between usability and performance needs.
• Evolve appropriate Product Management practices for a responsive, dynamic environment to foster effective execution of commitments.
• Be proactive in ensuring that the development and QA teams understand the requirements by attending backlog grooming and sprint planning sessions and initiating functional clarification sessions where needed.
• Setting timelines, driving project schedules, and leading cross-functional development teams from design through to release.
• Review the test plan and test scripts to ensure quality and coverage.
• Performing user acceptance testing.

The skills we need

Must have a proven track record of execution and can formulate a detailed product roadmap, and to execute on that plan.

• Ability to wear multiple hats to guide junior product managers, business analysts, UX experts and engineering to deliver world-class products.
• Solution-oriented, accountable, highly motivated and have a robust personality.
• The ability to take initiative in ambiguous situations, by identifying critical problems and driving solutions.
• Data-driven decision-making.
• Outstanding organizational and communication skills and the ability to balance multiple priorities
• Attention to detail
• An avid customer advocate

Qualifications & Experience:

• Bachelor's Degree or Advanced Diploma in a related field and a minimum of 5 years Product Management experience, of which a minimum of 2 years experience in a Product Development environment is required.
• If the degree/diploma qualification requirement isn’t met, then at least 8 years of Product Management experience, of which a minimum of 2 years experience in a Product Development environment is required.
• Experience in an e-commerce environment or in an API-driven technical environment would be an advantage.

Let’s talk about life @ Takealot Group

• The power is in your hands: We offer a market-related, Total Remuneration Package that allows full flexibility according to your needs. Go on, be the master of your own destiny.
• No doors: We aren’t fans of stuffy offices or siloed work environments. See someone you like? High five, collab and make something great.
• Remote working: Love water cooler chats and working from home? Takealot.com offers a hybrid working model for the best of both worlds.
• Mentorship programme: We aren’t kidding when we say the people with the best people win. Now’s your chance to be one of the best, by learning from the best.
• Naspers Tech Community & Online Learning: Share ideas and grow with global industry leaders who are all just a Slack message away. Love to learn? Up-skill with free access to courses on MyAcademy, Udacity, Coursera and more.
• Good times: Get to know the other extraordinary minds at takealot.com during regular social events and out-of-office activities (think hikes, think mini-golf, think good times).
• Staff discount: Millions of products across 28 departments. What more could you ask for?
• Birthday leave: Cake Day all the way. Enjoy your day off - you deserve it.
• Right tools, right job: Mac or Windows, two monitors or one. Whatever your preference, you’ll work on the latest tech, off the latest tech.
• Help when you need it most: Confidential counselling, legal support and financial guidance, for free, anytime, anywhere.
• Tech stack (for days): ReactJS, Python, Scala, Kotlin, Swift, Google Cloud, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes and all things machine learning. If you build it, they will come.
• Free parking: No more 5km fun runs to your desk (unless you want to).

go to method of application »

This position reports to the respective team's manager.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will be someone whose expertise directly translates into the development of robust software in the e-commerce domain. You will have the opportunity to implement best practices to improve existing software and participate in the development of new features. While we don't promote after-hours work as part of the regular workday, we run a 24/7 business with the need to keep systems up and running. Software Engineers are expected to provide after-hours support on a rotational basis to resolve critical system issues.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

• Design and build solutions to assist our business users, and improve customer experience
• Architect and design solutions with your team
• Develop code, making major improvements to non-functional areas
• Develop high quality production code for work of high complexity and scale
• Utilize and improve functional and non-functional testing practices
• Champion, challenge, and iterate on best practices within engineering
• Manage change in technologies in the division with due diligence
• Design solutions for complex problems with difficult decision trade-offs, typically system- or domain-wide
• Lead architecture proposals for your division's domain
• Participate in and collaborate on architecture proposals across engineering
• Own the maintenance of architecture documentation in the team
• Support alignment of architecture across the organisation
• Be on-call for systems owned by your team
• Respond to and resolve bugs in production for systems in your division
• Respond to alerts and support incident response within your division
• Investigate and drive resolution of issues which impact multiple teams
• Triage and respond to hot-desk support tickets
• Assume technical lead on major incidents impacting the division
• Lead technical analysis, and design specification documentation
• Assist with sprint planning, work estimation, and project prioritisation
• Assist the product teams in helping to determine priorities for technical projects
• Support, challenge existing, and define new engineering processes and directives
• Lead interviews and assess potential engineering candidates for skills and fit
• Review, and contribute fixes and content to internal documentation
• React to technology trends, identifying risks and opportunities for your divisions technologies, systems, and domains
• Mentor, coach, and share knowledge with your peers in your division
• Share knowledge through blog posts, tech talks, and workshops across engineering
• Contribute to discussions and decisions in the division
• Challenge others to always produce work of the highest quality
• Take on technical project leadership roles for projects across the division
• REST and RPC API implementation and maintenance (using Python)
• Develop and maintain automation tests
• Peer review of team code
• Liaise with various internal stakeholders to discuss project requirements, progress etc.
• Analyze and understand business requirements and OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and produce technical specifications that meet these requirements

Qualifications & Experience:

• Bachelor's Degree or Advanced Diploma in Computer Science, Mathematics or Engineering or equivalent experience in software development.
• In the event that you do not have a Bachelor’s Degree or an Advanced Diploma (Computer Science, Mathematics or Engineering), an equivalent experience requirement must be met, which equates to a minimum of 8 years’ of Software Development experience
• A thorough understanding of computer science fundamentals, including object-oriented design, data structures and algorithms
• 5 to 10 years in a software development role
• Experience in writing robust, efficient production code
• Experience with SQL database systems
• Experience with development in a Linux environment
• Proficient in a strongly typed opensource language such as Python, Java, Golang, etc
• Open to diversifying language skill set

Experience in the following will be advantageous:

• JavaScript, React, jQuery
• MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL
• Memcached, Redis
• Message Brokers, Queues and PubSub systems (e.g. Kafka and RabbitMQ)
• Containerisation (e.g. Docker)
• Orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes)
• GitHub, Travis CI, Jenkins
• AWS, GCP, Azure