Engineering Lead

Engineering Lead
Location: Cape Town (in office)
Type: Permanent
Experience: 5+ years

About the role
We’re working with a leading independent global asset manager with deep roots in South Africa. Their digital technology team is looking for a dynamic, multi-skilled engineering leader to drive the ongoing engineering effort behind their investment platform.
The role centres on engineering enablement, technical governance, and delivery oversight rather than direct line management, with a strong emphasis on AI-driven process innovation, engineering excellence, and empathetic leadership. They want a visionary, disciplined professional who continuously reinvents engineering practices using AI, while staying aligned with industry standards and business goals.

What you’ll do
Architecture design, oversight, and technical governance
• Work with the platform solution architect to provide hands-on oversight of detailed architecture and design across engineering squads
• Ensure alignment with strategic architectural direction, bridging high-level architecture and day-to-day engineering decisions
• Review and validate technical analysis before development begins, for feasibility, standards alignment, and accurate estimation
• Work with product owners and external partners to align API capabilities with client needs and platform strategy
• Provide technical leadership for external API integrations, ensuring secure, scalable, well-documented interfaces

Engineering enablement, automation, productivity, and quality at scale
• Manage engineering impediments and continuously manage access controls for security and relevance
• Champion best practice: CI/CD, automated testing, secure coding standards, and preventative quality tooling
• Define and enforce coding standards, peer review protocols, and automated quality gates (static analysis, performance checks, pipeline enforcement)
• Make sure quality gates can’t be bypassed under delivery pressure without structured governance
• Promote a culture of clean, maintainable, performant, scalable code
• Improve development velocity through intelligent automation and tooling without compromising reliability
• Source and embed tools that improve quality and prevent production issues before they occur

Platform security, resilience, and availability
• Own the roadmap for platform-wide technical debt, including vendor deprecations, mandated upgrades, and cybersecurity vulnerabilities
• Collaborate with InfoSec and infrastructure teams on timely remediation of risks
• Plan and prioritize engineering work that safeguards platform stability and compliance

Automation and AI-centred engineering
• Identify and implement AI-assisted tooling for code generation, automated reviews, test generation, performance validation, and static analysis
• Embed AI code review capabilities where appropriate
• Introduce preventative automated tooling so issues are caught before production
• Ensure responsible AI use through governance and human oversight
• Measure the impact of automation and AI adoption on quality, output, defect rates, and stability

Strategic collaboration and partner engagement
• Act as the technical liaison between internal teams and external partners
• Collaborate with the platform architect and delivery manager on cohesive planning and execution
• Represent engineering in strategic forums and contribute to the platform vision

What you’ll bring
• A BSc-level degree (or similar) in maths, computing, or engineering preferred
• 5+ years working with microservice architectures in a full-stack capacity, including Azure technologies, languages such as C#, and database languages such as T-SQL
• Strong .NET Core experience (C#, ASP.NET Core)
• Strong experience with UI frameworks (Angular, React, or Vue)
• Experience across the Azure cloud stack: App Services, Function Apps, Redis, Service Fabric, API Manager, Azure SQL, CosmosDB, Databricks, Event Grid, Data Factory
• Experience with microservice APIs, particularly containerized implementations (e.g. Service Fabric)
• Experience implementing automated test-driven development and continuous testing
• Experience across database technologies (SQL, NoSQL, file storage)
• Experience with source control and automation tools, particularly the Azure DevOps suite, is an advantage

Nice to have
• Prior knowledge of the asset management industry, especially investment systems and processes

What they look for in a person
• Attention to detail and a high level of accuracy
• Strong problem-solving, a logical thinker, numerate
• Willing to share knowledge and coach others, as well as learn from them
• A strong collaboration ethic across cross-functional teams