Engineering Team Lead (Contract)
The Engineering Team Lead is a hands-on technical leadership role responsible for driving technical delivery, architectural quality, and people development within our core product engineering team. The role combines senior individual contributor responsibilities with team leadership, ensuring scalable, secure, and reliable systems powering essential prepaid utilities and payment infrastructure used by millions of South Africans. Working closely with the CTO, product managers, and QA teams, the Engineering Team Lead will set engineering standards, guide architectural decisions, and foster a high-performing engineering culture while actively contributing production-grade code.
About this position
Retainer: R64,000 - R88,000 per month
Contract Duration: 12-months (rolling)
Location: Techno Park, Stellenbosch
Working Environment: Hybrid (2 days in office with core hours of 9am - 3pm)
Start Date: ASAP
Key Duties & Responisbilities:
- Technical Leadership
- Architect, build, and maintain backend services using Node.js (TypeScript) and React-based frontends.
- Establish and enforce engineering best practices across code quality, testing, security, and documentation.
- Lead architecture discussions, technical design reviews, and RFC processes.
- Own system reliability including incident response and post-mortem practices.
- Drive adoption of AWS cloud services and CI/CD best practices.
- Integrate third-party payment gateways, switching platforms, and utility APIs.
- Oversee delivery of scalable fintech infrastructure handling high-volume transactions
- Ensure adherence to DevOps and cloud-native engineering principles.
- Maintain high system performance, security, and availability standards.
- Support monitoring, observability, and production stability practices
- People Leadership & Delivery
- Manage, mentor, and grow a team of 5–10 engineers.
- Conduct regular 1-on-1s, performance reviews, and career development planning.
- Collaborate with CTO and Product teams on roadmaps, sprint planning, and OKRs.
- Remove delivery blockers and maintain sustainable engineering pace.
- Support hiring through technical screening, interviewing, and onboarding.
- Foster a culture of ownership, psychological safety, and continuous improvement.
Technical Requirements & Experience:
- 5+ years professional software engineering experience.
- Minimum 2+ years in a senior or technical leadership role.
- Proven experience leading engineering teams and managing delivery.
- Strong background in payments systems or fintech environments.
- Solid understanding of distributed systems, APIs, and microservices architecture.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent practical experience).
- Languages: TypeScript, JavaScript, SQL
- Backend: Node.js, NestJS, REST APIs, event-driven architecture
- Frontend: React (hooks, state management, component patterns)
- Cloud: AWS (Lambda, ECS/EKS, RDS, S3, SQS, CloudFront, Route53)
- Databases: PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Redis
- DevOps: Docker, CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, CircleCI or similar)
- Monitoring: AWS CloudWatch, Sentry
Payments: Payment gateways, transaction flows, reconciliation systemsHow can I apply?
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