Engineering Manager

Talent Safari; Cape Town; Hybrid; ZAR 600 000 - 900 000; Full time

Job summary

A cutting-edge fintech company in Cape Town is seeking a skilled Technical Lead to guide teams in delivering innovative payment solutions. This role involves mentoring engineers, managing performance assessments, and ensuring technical standards are met. Ideal candidates have strong software engineering backgrounds, expertise in payment systems, and experience with agile methodologies. Benefits include flexible work, competitive salaries, and an inclusive culture focused on growth and innovation.

Benefits

Generous leave allocation

Market-related salaries

Ownership through VSOP

Qualifications

• Proven record as a leading technical advisor in software engineering.
• Experience managing software development teams effectively.
• A comprehensive understanding of payment transaction processes.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical discussions and mentor team members.
• Manage performance evaluations and hiring processes.
• Participate in defining and delivering software development goals.

Skills

Technical expertise in software engineering

Strong people management

Payments domain knowledge

Agile methodologies

Tools

Python

Typescript

Terraform

AWS

Jira

Gitlab

Job description

Peach Payments is a cutting-edge fintech company shaping the future of digital payments across Africa. We empower businesses of all sizes - from startups to enterprise merchants - by providing a secure, scalable, and seamless payments infrastructure.

Team Mission

Our mission is to deliver secure, intelligent, and scalable card payments through ownership of core infrastructure and innovation in processing, tokenization, and orchestration.

Your Mission

• Collaboratively lead the pods to be the best version of themselves.
• You see your pods’ health and output as your primary focus.
• You own the delivery of product commitments and are always looking to improve productivity.

Role Expectations

Technical Standard Accountability

• Accountable for the technical standard and direction of the team and for the successful delivery of technology objectives (OKRs) and key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Collaborate with the Tech Lead to uphold high technical standards, guiding architectural decisions, and ensuring alignment with the organization’s goals and engineering strategy.
• Articulate the rationale behind technical decisions and maintain a detailed understanding of the team’s prioritized technical work.
• Advocate for the prioritization of technical debt in collaboration with the Product Manager to ensure system robustness and longevity.
• Provide support for maintaining and attending to the team’s technical roadmap.

Merchant & Stakeholder Management

• Serve as the lead technical advisor for merchants, assessing their technical requirements and landscape, thus guiding the sales team by strategically aligning Peach's technical solutions with customer needs.
• Lead technical discussions with stakeholders, partners, and merchants, serving as the primary technical point of contact during incidents and support queries.
• Develop and deliver training to up-skill Application Engineers, enabling them to handle more complex and technical support queries for the pods.
• Promote transparency and continuous improvement by ensuring the visibility of the team’s technical KPIs to stakeholders and leadership.

Hands-on Support

• Engage directly in the software development lifecycle by reviewing pull requests and guiding the deployment process in collaboration with the Tech Lead.
• Lead and engage in sprint ceremonies such as planning and refinement sessions by providing technical guidance on complex tasks and informed input on ticket estimations.
• Provide support to the Product Manager for better roadmap planning by providing technical insight, estimations and by running Technical Discovery on new tasks.
• Facilitate the decomposition of high-level ideas into actionable, high-value deliverables.
• Support the Tech Lead in mentoring and upskilling less-senior engineers, contributing to their technical development.
• Identify and mitigate risks that may impact delivery, quality and performance and develop associated contingency plans.
• Stay current with industry trends and best practices to drive relevant innovation within the team.
• Capable of stepping into the Tech Lead role when necessary.

Own the process

• Ensure work across the pod is balanced and reasonable.
• Promote transparency and continuous improvement by ensuring the visibility of the team’s velocity and predictability to stakeholders and leadership.
• Own people management responsibilities: performance management, hiring, conflict resolution, providing feedback, mentoring, career mapping and coaching.
• Ensure the pod is adequately staffed for long-term health.
• Develop and maintain a succession plan for key roles within the pod to ensure continuity and resilience.
• Propose and facilitate internal mobility.

Competencies: What You Bring

• Solid Technical expertise: You are an accomplished Software Engineer. You can confidently lead technical discussions, grow strong technical teams and set a good technical standard within your teams.
• Strong people management experience: Timely candidate evaluations, run interview processes leading to positive candidate experience; participate in calibration, career conversations, performance review and salary adjustments.
• Payments domain knowledge: Comprehensive understanding of the steps of a transaction, knowledge of the technologies involved, the regulatory landscape, and the business drivers behind it all (customers, merchants, acquiring banks, etc..)
• Competent in agile methodologies (SCRUM beneficial): Use sprint metrics to drive efficiency and continuous improvement in delivery.

Our Tech Stack

• Languages: Python / Typescript
• Infrastructure/Configuration As Code: Terraform, Ansible, Packer
• Infrastructure: AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, S3, Serverless, EC2, VPC, RDS), Kafka
• Orchestration: EKS
• Databases: MongoDB, MySQL
• Tools: Cursor, Jira, Confluence, Gitlab, Agential AI (Gemini, Claude)
• CI/CD & Automation: GitLab Pipelines
• Monitoring: Cloudwatch / Grafana / Sentry

Why Join Peach Payments?

• Impact: Work on mission-critical payments infrastructure processing millions of transactions.
• Growth: Be part of a fast-growing company expanding across Africa.
• Culture: Join a high-performance, diverse, and empathetic team focused on respect for people and merchant success.
• Flexibility: Remote-first hybrid working - work from anywhere while staying connected to a world-class team.
• Benefits: Benefits include a generous annual and life leave allocation, market-related salaries, owning a piece of the Peach pie through VSOP, and more.

Be part of our journey to redefine digital payments in Africa!

At Peach Payments, we value diversity and are committed to inclusion across race, gender, age, religion, identity, and experiences.