Engineering Manager

1 day ago – Be among the first 25 applicants. Takealot.com , South Africa's leading online retailer, is looking for a highly talented Machine Learning Software Engineering Manager to join our team. We are a young, dynamic, hyper‑growth company looking for smart, creative, hard‑working people with integrity. Why Takealot.com? Scale: 4 million happy shoppers on takealot.com and 2.7 million on Mr D. Learn: Work alongside industry leaders and up‑skill in record time. Grow: Expand your career within the Takealot Group – we promote from within. Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It You will lead a team of Machine Learning Software Engineers, delivering quality solutions on time, within budget and scope, and fostering a culture of quality and personal accountability. Key Responsibilities Architect, develop, and maintain high‑performance, scalable backend and RESTful web applications. Lead a hands‑on team, spending at least 30% of your time writing code and building machine‑learning models. Drive architectural and strategic planning with peers and senior developers. Manage day‑to‑day people management and development of a high‑performing team. Advocate for agile and iterative engineering practices. Empower team members and maintain strong relationships with internal and external stakeholders. The Skills We Need Customer‑centric and solutions‑oriented. Natural leader with strong communication skills. Experienced in iterative engineering with agile culture. Time‑management and organizational skills. Proven ability to build positive working relationships. Comfortable with rapidly changing requirements. Strong initiative for process improvement. Qualifications & Experience Bachelor’s Degree or Advanced Diploma in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Machine Learning or Engineering, with at least 5 years of software development experience, 3 years in production‑grade machine‑learning solutions. Equivalent experience requirement: 8 years of software development, 5 years in production‑grade machine‑learning solutions. Minimum 3 years of managing and leading a software engineering team, including mentoring and performance management. Technical lead experience in the absence of prior management. Guiding engineers on model evaluation, architecture, error analysis, hyper‑parameter tuning. Hands‑on experience in Python (test‑driven), and familiarity with Java, C, C++, or C#. Strong grasp of software fundamentals: OOP, data structures, algorithms. Experience with MySQL/Postgres, BigQuery, or similar high‑load systems. Distributed system design experience. Big‑data exposure: volume, variety, velocity. Preferred Skills and Experience Software for highly transactional retail platforms. Agile practices, source‑code control, IDE, testing tools. Deployment tools and processes. NoSQL data stores, Kafka, AWS/GCP, Docker/Kubernetes. RESTful API and microservice development. Natural language processing, search systems (Solr, ElasticSearch). Recommendation model development. Jupyter, Scikit‑learn, SciPy, NumPy, Pandas, PyTorch, TensorFlow, TensorFlow Extended, TensorFlow Serving. Kubeflow, Dataform. What We Offer Market‑related total remuneration package with flexibility. Remote or hybrid working model. Mentorship programme. Access to Naspers Tech Community and online learning (MyAcademy, Udacity, Coursera). Social events, staff discount, birthday leave, career support. Modern tech stack: ReactJS, Python, Scala, Kotlin, Swift, Google Cloud, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes. Paid parking. Equal Opportunity Employer. Applicants from previously disadvantaged groups and people with disabilities will be given preference. #J-18808-Ljbffr