Principal Software Engineer
takealot.com4 days ago
Cape Town, South AfricaStaff+
Responsibilities
- Lead the architecture and design of highly scalable, available, and secure distributed systems across the Takealot Group.
- Lead 0-to-1 engineering initiatives, evaluate emerging technologies, and prototype new capabilities for production use.
- Decompose complex business and supply-chain constraints into simple technical solutions.
- Establish and champion group-wide technical standards, architecture documentation, and engineering best practices.
- Serve as the technical authority for demanding cross-departmental projects and manage system interdependencies.
- Mentor senior engineers and support their technical career development.
- Provide data-informed technical guidance to executive decision-makers and align technology roadmaps with business goals.
- Drive operational excellence by identifying systemic risks and improving reliability, performance, and developer velocity.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related technical field.
- Postgraduate degree in a related field is preferred.
- 10+ years of relevant experience in software engineering, relational database internals, and distributed systems.
- 5+ years of technical leadership experience influencing results-oriented development teams.
- Proven experience taking major software projects from ideation through production deployment and operational support.
- Proven experience driving technical transformation, leading greenfield 0-to-1 projects, and evangelising new technologies across large engineering organizations.
- Experience influencing developers to deliver highly available and scalable services.
- Deep domain experience in e-commerce, supply chain, logistics, machine learning, web development, IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS.
- Expert knowledge of advanced data structures, algorithms, and complex system design.
- Subject-matter expertise in databases, caching, load balancers, message queues, distributed key stores, and high-throughput transaction processing.
- Deep understanding of coding practices, scalability, security, and performance tuning.
- Strong communication, negotiation, conflict-resolution, technical project-management, prioritization, and organizational-transformation skills.
Benefits
- Hybrid working model in South Africa.
- Flexible market-related total remuneration package.
- Mentorship program and access to Naspers Tech Community resources.
- Free access to MyAcademy, Udacity, Coursera, and other online learning courses.
- Regular social and out-of-office activities.
- Staff discount across Takealot’s product departments.
- Birthday leave.
- Choice of Mac or Linux and monitor setup.
- Confidential counseling, legal support, and financial guidance.
- Free parking.
Tech Stack
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