Engineering Manager - Cape Town

JobCubby; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 1,200,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Unlimited annual leave

Great healthcare benefits

Employee discounts

Job summary

Zepz is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead a pricing and loyalty platform team. You will own services handling high request volumes across Kubernetes clusters, migrate legacy promo stacks, and partner with Product, Data Science, and Commercial teams to unlock segment-based and ML-driven pricing.

You will hire, shape roadmaps, evaluate technologies, and drive execution. The role emphasizes cloud-native patterns, resilience, and delivering value across WorldRemit and Sendwave ecosystems.

Qualifications

• Experience managing the design, build, and deployment of web services on cloud-based infrastructure (AWS preferred).
• Strong leadership and mentoring capabilities for a high-performing engineering team.
• Experience with pricing, loyalty, or promo platforms is a plus.
• Ability to translate business requirements into technical roadmaps and deliverables.

Responsibilities

• Develop talent within the team and foster a high-performance environment.
• Lead hiring, roadmap creation, and execution for pricing, loyalty, and promo initiatives.
• Collaborate with Product, Data Science, and Commercial teams to align priorities.
• Hands-on coding and reviews to uphold quality and resilience of services.
• Communicate progress and decisions effectively at the executive level.

Skills

Leadership

Java/Kotlin

Kubernetes

AWS

Distributed systems

Team coaching

Communication

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

AWS

CI/CD

Job description

Join Zepz: Breaking Down Borders, Together

Our Meaningful Mission At Zepz, we're all about breaking down barriers for our customers and our teammates. Our purpose is deeply personal, we provide a lifeline and deliver opportunities to cross-border communities that need it most through cutting edge finance and tech.Zepz is the power behind WorldRemit and Sendwave, driven by the mission to celebrate the incredible impact migrants have, both at home and abroad. We're not just moving money; we're building a world that truly recognizes and supports global connections.

Our Core Commitments — What We Live By

• Integrity: We always do the right thing. It’s simple, but it’s the foundation of everything we build for our customers and each other.
• Outcomes: We work for our customers. Their success and prosperity are the results we focus on delivering.
• Velocity: We are fast! We maintain high energy levels and make smart decisions quickly, keeping us nimble and ahead of the curve.

Perks of Joining Our Team

We believe in empowering colleagues because we genuinely trust our team. Our culture is founded on this high trust, which naturally encourages the high ownership that drives us to meet our shared high expectations and deliver high performance. While we have all the tools to work remotely, we value the purpose and benefits of in-person connections so we expect our teams to come to the office on a regular basis, and therefore be within a comfortable commutable distance from our Cape Town office. Alongside a great office environment, think unlimited annual leave , great healthcare benefits, and employee discounts. We want you to thrive and focus entirely on making your biggest impact! In turn, we expect you to bring high ownership and commitment to your work. This is a place where we value trust and high performance, and we'll provide the environment and support needed for you to excel

About the role

The Quotes domain at Zepz owns the systems that determine what every customer sees and pays: the pricing engine, FX rates, loyalty and promotions, coupons, content delivery, and the operational tooling around them. Every quote a customer receives — across 4,000 corridors and both WorldRemit and Sendwave — flows through our services. We sit at the intersection of growth, margin, and customer experience: the right price at the right moment is what turns a visitor into a sender, and a sender into a repeat customer. We're looking for an Engineering Manager to build and lead a team responsible for the next generation of our pricing and loyalty platform. You will own services that handle hundreds of requests per second across two Kubernetes clusters, drive the migration of our legacy promo stack, and partner with Product, Data Science, and Commercial to unlock segment-based and ML-driven pricing. You will be at the centre of hiring, roadmap creation, technology evaluation, and execution. Our mission is to build a world‑class quoting and loyalty platform from first principles — one that lets Zepz expand into new corridors and products while making remittance cheaper, more personalised, and more rewarding for a global customer base. This includes growing average basket size, lifting M1 retention through reward redemption, hardening anti‑abuse controls on promo codes, and reducing the friction between marketing intent and what the customer ultimately sees in their quote.

Technologies & Environment

We run a microservice architecture primarily in Java/Kotlin (pricing engine, loyalty, FX rates, segmentation) with some .NET services on the legacy WorldRemit estate and Node.js/TypeScript for marketing and operational tooling. Services are deployed to AWS EKS across two Kubernetes clusters, backed by PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Redis, S3, and SQS. We put a strong emphasis on automation, unit/integration testing and performance testing — our services are on the hot path of every transaction, so resilience and latency matter. We aim to be data‑driven in our decision making, so building our services to emit the right signals from day one is a must.

Reporting to the VP of Engineering, you will

• Develop talent within the team.
• Create a positive and high‑performing environment.
• Ensure the team is aligned on company priorities, goals, and OKRs — particularly around growing remittances, lifting promo activation and retention, and migrating the WR loyalty stack to Talon.One.
• Engage in hands‑on participation in engineering tasks such as coding, peer reviews, and building automation tests.
• Act as the initial point of contact for your team and facilitate the inclusion of team members as required.
• Work closely with Product Managers to align on your team's capacity across pricing, loyalty, and promo initiatives.
• Collaborate with stakeholders across Commercial, Growth Marketing, Payments, Fincrime, and Data, translating requirements into roadmaps for pricing, loyalty, and promo capabilities.

What you bring to the table

Leadership

• Technical ownership of services related to our pricing engine, FX rates, loyalty programs, and promo/coupon platform.
• Champion a mindset focused on maintaining a high standard for quality and operational resilience — these services are on the hot path of every quote and every transaction.
• Decisive and opinionated on what good software engineering practices look like.
• Lead cross‑team efforts, highlighting areas of improvement and driving execution.
• Motivate team members, drive engagement and steer professional development.
• Strong communications and presentation skills; comfortable presenting at the executive level — pricing and loyalty are board‑visible levers.

Technical

• Experience managing the design, build, and deployment of web services on cloud‑based infrastructure (AWS preferred).
• Experience leading technology and tool evaluation/selection — you will be making calls on loyalty platforms, pricing optimisation tooling, and how to retire legacy promo systems.
• Experience with orchestration and containerization tools such as Kubernetes and Docker.
• Comfortable working with JVM services (Java/Kotlin); able to lead engineers across mixed stacks (.NET legacy, Node.js).
• Strong grasp of data‑intensive systems — caching strategies, real‑time vs. batch tradeoffs, and instrumenting services for downstream analytics.

AI Literacy & Tools

• A genuine curiosity about AI and how it can be applied in your area of work — from accelerating analysis and insight generation, to improving how we design and deliver processes and communications.
• Practical experience using AI tools in a professional context — whether to connect information, draft content, build frameworks, or create insights from data. We want people who actively use AI to increase productivity, not those who are waiting to be told to.
• Strong AI literacy — an understanding of what AI assistants can and cannot do, how to prompt effectively, and how to critically evaluate AI‑generated output before using it.
• Awareness of the ethical considerations and responsible use of AI in the workplace, particularly in the context of sensitive data, customer experience, and compliance.
• Prior experience using Claude (Anthropic) is a nice‑to‑have but not essential — what matters most is that you are genuinely engaged with AI as a tool, comfortable experimenting, and eager to share what works with your wider team

If you want to join us in our journey to help break barriers in financial access and improve lives globally, there's no better place or time to join.

Our global team of 800+ people is spread across six continents. We aspire to hire the best mix of people from former Olympians to YouTube influencers and we speak over twenty languages. This incredible diversity isn't a bonus; it's the engine that lets us serve the world.