Head of Software Engineering

PBT Group has a vacancy open for Head of Software Engineering. The Head of Software Engineering is responsible for the development of high-quality designs and solutions and the integration of these at the Enterprise level.

You will be responsible for managing cross-functional agile teams through our full SDLC from estimation to delivery as well as having direct report responsibility for the engineering staff. To be successful, you will need to collaborate with our Product Management, Design, Quality Engineering, Technical Architecture, and Systems organisations on everything from roadmap estimation to project execution and delivery.

The Head of Software Engineering is also the Chapter Lead for software engineering within the bank and is responsible for the driving improvement of standard practices that are required to deliver quality of solutions. This will involve growing the engineering capability through establishing guardrails and best practice, research and development and building a community for engineers to learn and share.

**Duties**:

- Able to roll up their sleeves and play a hands-on role while building a world class team.
- Responsible for the development of high-quality designs and solutions and the integration of these at the Enterprise level.
- Set technical standards and SDLC processes.
- Provide leadership and direction for team of software engineers who are accountable for creating prototypes, developing user-centred software, advise on technical specifications, and who research new techniques. Provide technical and career mentoring for the engineering organization.
- Provides sizing and scoping for development work required at the enterprise level.
- Responsible for the software development life cycle, taking the lead on software development projects.
- Ensure that software development tasks are well coordinated.
- Balance trade-offs between design and implementation.
- Client engagement at the Executive level to drive new products/ features and to ensure operational excellence.
- Enable rapid iteration.
- Ensure systems are scalable, fault tolerant and robust. Working in an environment that is forever looking forward to preparing for the future. This is due to the platform being highly available with a large customer base that will continue to grow. Experience in this area is highly sought.
- Assure that security and accessibility continue to be primary goals in construction of any software.
- The solutions are mainly built using AWS cloud infrastructure
- Coordinate estimation of operational costs associated with updated/new functionality with our systems organization.
- Cultivate a culture of testing and automation throughout the engineering organization.
- Advocate and advance software engineering practices in teams
- Drive the creation and adoption of standards and best practices for software development that is delivered on time and of high quality
- Help develop and evangelize great engineering and organizational practices
- Collaborate with the product engineering management (Design, Product, QA and IT) team to improve visibility, processes, and communication mechanisms.
- Create platforms of engagement for software engineers to collaborate and share knowledge.
- Ensure consistency of methodologies is followed
- Full-stack software development experience and capability
- Experience or comfort working with native mobile apps
- Experience with modern technologies (Flutter, AWS, Azure, Kafka, Kinesis, relational database systems (MySQL) and ability to work with large databases
- Understanding and knowledge of scaling and proven track record of scaling systems
- Experience growing and developing people
- Experience leading agile chapters and/or engineering practices

Required Skills & Experience:

- 7 years+ Software Development experience
- A successful track record working as an engineering leader across multiple teams
- Experience leading and contributing to software architecture
- Experience leading software engineering practices
- Experience establishing and organizing communities of practices
- Experience with systems that leverage near real-time data to drive personalized experiences
- Experience working with consumer facing digital products
- Experience with systems which have sophisticated access control/configuration capabilities
- Exceptional written and oral communication skills
- Exceptional critical thinking and analytical skills, with the ability to quickly understand complex systems and data
- Experience balancing managing direct reports and making contributions to the software
- Experience providing project visibility to senior management
- Passion for data driven decision making and continuous process improvement

Qualifications/ Certification:

- Matric
- Degree in Computer Science/ Engineering/ Mathematics or related.