Mr D - Engineering Manager

Mr D, a division of takealot.com, is looking for a highly talented Engineering Manager to join our team in Cape Town. We are a young, dynamic, hyper-growth company looking for smart, creative, hard-working people with integrity to join us! This is an exciting opportunity to lead a growing team of engineers working on Mr D’s ambitious development roadmap.

This is a hands-on role where you can expect around 30% of your time writing code and working with others on your team directly contributing to the production of code. The remainder of your time will be split between architectural and strategic planning with peers and senior developers across the department and the day-to-day people management & development required of a high-performing and successful team.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

• Guide team development efforts toward successful delivery
• Provide technical leadership to team members through coaching and mentorship
• Enforce high standards of software quality within the team by establishing good practices and habits
• Identify and encourage areas for growth and improvement within the team
• Collaborate with other software developers, technical product managers, product owners, and business owners to plan, design, develop, test, and maintain business applications
• Assist in the collection and documentation of user requirements, development of user stories, estimates, and work plans
• Prepare reports, manuals, and other documentation on the status, operation, and maintenance of software
• Ensure that the team builds applications in accordance with agreed best practices and standards around security, scalability, operations, and testing.
• Participate in peer-reviews of solution designs and related code
• Develop, refine, and tune integrations between applications
• Analyze and resolve technical and application problems
• Assess opportunities for application and process improvement and prepare documentation of rationale to share with team members and other affected parties
• Communicate with leadership regarding progress against plans, issues, and needs
• Work with other team leads to leverage targeted technologies, processes, standards, and methodologies
• Conduct regular 1:1 meetings with each assigned team member to assist with issues and provide mentoring support
• Serve as an integral part of the recruitment team for open positions within the team
• Provide performance input of assigned team members for the performance enhancement review process
• Develop and maintain strong relationships with key stakeholders outside of your area
• Strong driver to identify and improve key areas for engineering staff retention
• Influences team to adopt current company technology standards
• Ensure your team implements on-call rotations and manages their operations effectively
• Enables the team to reduce tech debt, automate mundane work, reduce hot desk workload, and build systems for success

The skills we need:

• A solutions-oriented, can-do attitude and high-energy
• Strong analytical and critical thinking, using data to inform decisions
• Capability to present ideas succinctly, in writing and verbally
• Passion for learning new skills and appreciation for inventing and simplifying
• A curious thinker who understands technical topics beyond the average reader
• Comfortable with rapidly changing and/or loosely defined requirements that are refined over time
• Thorough understanding of computer science fundamentals, OO concepts, data structures, and algorithms

Qualifications & Experience:

• At least 5 years experience in software engineering, with at least 2 years in a leadership role
• Degree in Computer Science or Engineering or equivalent experience
• Experience leading and managing a team of engineers on complex software projects
• Experience influencing a team of developers to deliver highly available and scalable solutions
• Experience designing or architecting (design patterns, reliability, and scaling) new and existing systems
• Experience with stateless architecture design, microservices, and the understanding of the strengths and weaknesses thereof
• Experience with full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations
• Experience with cloud service providers like GCP/AWS and development in a *nix environment
• Strong hands-on experience in Python development, with a mindset for developing optimized code
• Experience with creating APIs and using databases (relational & non-relational)