Principal Software Engineer
Takealot Group2 months ago
Cape Town, South AfricaStaff+
Responsibilities
- Lead the architecture 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.
- Decompose complex business and supply-chain constraints into simple technical solutions.
- Establish and champion group-wide technical standards, architecture documentation, and best practices.
- Act as the technical authority for demanding cross-departmental projects and manage system interdependencies.
- Mentor senior engineers and guide their technical and career development.
- Provide data-informed technical guidance to executive decision-makers and align technical roadmaps with business goals.
- Identify systemic risks and drive initiatives that improve platform reliability, performance, and developer velocity.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related technical field is required; a relevant postgraduate degree 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, large-scale 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 a large engineering organisation.
- 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 understanding of advanced data structures, algorithms, and complex system design.
- Subject matter expertise across multiple databases, caching systems, load balancers, message queues, distributed key stores, and high-throughput transaction processing.
- Deep understanding of coding best practices, scalability, security, and performance tuning.
- Strong communication, negotiation, conflict-resolution, technical project-management, planning, prioritisation, and organisational transformation skills.
Benefits
- Market-related total remuneration package with flexibility according to individual needs.
- Hybrid working model combining remote work and office collaboration.
- Mentorship programme and access to the Naspers Tech Community.
- Free access to learning resources including MyAcademy, Udacity, and Coursera.
- Regular social events and out-of-office activities.
- Staff discount on products across 28 departments.
- Birthday leave.
- Choice of Mac or Linux and flexible monitor setup.
- Confidential counselling, legal support, and financial guidance.
- Free parking.
Tech Stack
Categories