Senior DevOps & Software Delivery Leader

Woolworths Financial Services; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 1,800,000 - 2,500,000; Full time

Job summary

Woolworths Financial Services is seeking a proven technology leader to head the Developers and DevOps professionals within the WFS Digital Factory. You will set standards, drive security, quality and deployment of solutions, and manage resources, risks, and stakeholder communications.

You will lead strategy, architecture decisions, governance, and operational excellence across SDLC, IaC, CI/CD, cloud platforms, and observability, ensuring scalable, secure, and high-velocity software delivery in

Qualifications

• Computer Science/Information Systems/Mathematics/Engineering degree.
• AWS/Azure certifications.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the Development and DevOps vision and strategy aligned to broader IT and business goals.
• Develop long-term roadmaps for team capacity, systems scalability, and platform reliability.
• Lead cross-functional teams with a focus on engineering culture, DevOps adoption, and agile maturity.
• Serve as a key decision-maker for application architecture, tooling, and development standards.
• Lead hiring, mentoring, and performance management across development and DevOps roles.
• Act as a liaison between software engineering, QA, operations, infrastructure, and cybersecurity teams.
• Collaborate and support the development of the digital strategy and plan.
• Manage full software development lifecycle (SDLC) including design, development, code review, testing, release, and maintenance.
• Oversee engineering quality assurance, ensuring coding standards, test coverage, and secure coding practices.
• Coordinate with product management and stakeholders to ensure timely, on-scope delivery.
• Facilitate agile ceremonies and champion lean/agile practices (e.g., Scrum, SAFe, or Kanban).
• Be involved in the Lower-Level solution design in collaboration with the Solution Architect.
• Oversee CI/CD pipeline development and maintenance using tools such as Jenkins, Bitbucket, GitHub, Sonarqube, Tenable.io, Terraform, QA test framework, etc.
• Champion infrastructure as code (IaC) practices using Terraform, etc.
• Implement and maintain containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, ECS/EKS)
• Lead efforts for observability — monitoring, logging, alerting, and APM (e.g., Grafana, ELK, DataDog, etc.)
• Collaborate with Information Security to embed DevSecOps practices.
• Manage public/hybrid cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) for application hosting, deployment, and scaling.
• Automate manual operational tasks
• Be involved in the Lower-Level solution design in collaboration with the Solution Architect.
• Establish change management controls and deployment governance in line with ITIL or equivalent frameworks
• Present progress reports, risk assessments, and incident post-mortems to senior stakeholders
• Ensure appropriate documentation for software, environments, and infrastructure.
• Maintain audit-readiness and support internal and external compliance assessments
• Manage costs according to budget, as it relates to technology, people and process
• Deployment frequency: Time-to-market for new releases
• Change failure rate: % of changes that result in service incidents
• Mean time to recovery (MTTR): Average time to recover from incidents
• Uptime / SLA adherence: Application availability and performance
• Automation coverage: % of infrastructure managed as code
• Code quality: Test coverage, bug rate, code review compliance
• Team engagement: Retention, satisfaction, and professional growth of team members
• Languages: JavaScript/TypeScript, C#, Python, Java, Go, Swift, Kotlin
• Frameworks: Node.js, .NET Core, Angular, React, Spring Boot
• Low-code platforms (e.g. OutSystems)
• Cloud Platforms: AWS, Azure, GCP (including deep knowledge of the cloud platforms services)
• CI/CD: Jenkins, Bitbucket pipelines
• IaC: Terraform
• Containers: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm
• Monitoring: Grafana, ELK Stack, DataDog
• Version Control: Git, GitHub, GitLab
• Agile Tools: Jira, Confluence

Skills

Technical Leadership

People Management

Strategic Thinking

Collaboration

Problem Solving

Resilience & Agility

Education

Computer Science/Information Systems/Mathematics/Engineering degree

Tools

Jenkins

Bitbucket pipelines

Terraform

Docker

Kubernetes

Helm

Grafana

ELK Stack

DataDog

Git

GitHub

GitLab

Jira

Confluence

Job description

Woolworths Financial Services is seeking a proven technology leader to head the Developers and DevOps professionals within the WFS Digital Factory. You will set standards, drive security, quality and deployment of solutions, and manage resources, risks, and stakeholder communications.

You will lead strategy, architecture decisions, governance, and operational excellence across SDLC, IaC, CI/CD, cloud platforms, and observability, ensuring scalable, secure, and high-velocity software delivery in