Software Engineering Team Lead

Root is a fast-growing tech startup and we’re on a mission to build the future of insurance. We're looking for a Senior Back-End Software Engineer with Team Lead experience to join our Engineering team. In this role as a Team Lead, you would manage both your personal contribution and that of your team. You would be leading one of Root’s engineering pods, and your responsibility is to ensure that your team is doing their best work at Root every day in a consistent and predictable manner, to ensure that your team builds reliable and effective software that solves real problems. You have autonomy to take ownership within the engineering team for architecting and building high quality code and features. This full-time role is based at our De Waterkant office in Cape Town but is remote-friendly. **️ What you'll do**: **Build with code excellence and high-velocity** - You'll drive rapid prototyping and implement new concepts and features. - You'll ensure consistent high code quality, maintainability, thorough testing, and continuous improvement of engineering standards, tooling, and processes. **Efficient delivery and strategic leadership** - Offer accurate delivery estimations and high shipping cadence (at least weekly). - Transition from a Specialised "Doer" to a Generalist "Orchestrator" while leading strategic collaboration and direction. **Platform operations** - Ensure high robustness, reliability, and security for enterprise-scale customers. - Swiftly identify, communicate, and resolve platform issues, bugs, and business logic concerns. **Continuous learning and growth** - Mentor and upskill team members while fostering collaborative learning. - Drive innovation through an effective hiring process and a culture of experimentation and collaboration. *** **We are looking for someone with**: **Core requirements to perform responsibilities**: - Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or equivalent working experience. - At least 2 years experience mentoring and managing a team of engineers. - Passionate about encouraging growth, learning, and mentoring others and contributing to a positive work culture. - Ability to collaborate well with both technical and non-technical teams. - Able to manage time, output and energy well, both personally and within a team. - Excellent at planning, prioritising and breaking down tasks. - High proficiency in back-end web technologies such as Node.js/Express, Spring, Laravel, Django, ASP.NET etc. - High competency working with relational database technologies and SQL. - Excellent ability to identify, define, solve process and technical problems. - Experience with writing unit and integration tests (Jest, JUnit, NUnit etc.). - Able to rapidly prototype and test a solution to a problem. - Has a continuous improvement mindset, is curious and is driven to succeed. - Comfortable working under pressure in a small team. **Who we are**: Our mission is to enable innovation in insurance by building the infrastructure required to reach the future of insurance. We are striving to be the global API standard for insurance. **We show up for our mission by**: - Taking ownership to the extreme. - Moving fast and shipping things. - Starting with _Why_ - Assuming good intent. - Keeping things transparent - we are open with others and ourselves. - Keeping it simple. - Learning fast and deep - Not reinventing the wheel. **We pride ourselves on**: - Having low ego - we are humble, self aware & respectful. - Being empathetic and showing compassion. - Staying adaptable - we are innately curious and constantly learning and changing. - Being remarkable - we are resourceful and effective. **How we enable success**: Our team is made up of smart, passionate, and kind individuals working together to build a world-class business. We take the time to develop personal relationships with each other. Over and above daily team lunches, we do frequent team outings and ad-hoc adventures (when global pandemics permit). We create and enable an environment for people to do their best work. To support this, we focus on a culture of autonomy, transparency and trust. As a startup, we care _a lot _about innovation, and believe in an iterative way of working to drive innovation forward. We encourage each other and foster a working culture of sharing early versions of our work and implementing feedback fast. **Why join us?**: We have ambitious goals. Our mission is to power innovators in insurance, globally, and we’re well on our way there. You’ll join at a very exciting part of the journey, and your contribution over the next few years will directly and visibly impact Root’s global success. Our team is incredibly friendly and collaborative. If you care about solving challenging problems with people you enjoy being around, this is the place for you. **_ Please note _