Tech Lead, AI & Cloud for Risk & Savings

Sanlam; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 1,800,000 - 2,400,000; Full time

Job summary

Sanlam is seeking a senior engineering leader to drive delivery across cloud-native platforms within the Retail Affluent business. You will mentor engineers, steer architectural decisions, and collaborate with product management to align technical roadmaps with business goals.

You will champion DevOps, CI/CD, IaC, and security best practices, lead incident response, and foster AI maturity across solutions, ensuring scalable, reliable systems in a banking/insurance context.

Qualifications

• Degree or diploma in Computer Science, IT, or related field will be an advantage.
• At least 10+ years’ of software engineering experience.
• At least 2 years’ experience in a technical leadership capacity across modern software engineering, architecture, cloud platforms, and secure solution design.
• Familiarity with DevOps practices (CI/CD, IaC, containers) and observability tools.
• Exposure to cloud engineering, including scalable cloud solutions, platform adoption, reliability, and cost-aware engineering.
• Proven track record of designing, building, and scaling distributed systems in cloud environments.
• Experience with microservices, event-driven architectures, and API design.

Responsibilities

• Mentor team members on technical skills, career development, and growth.
• Provide regular feedback and coach on technical and soft skills.
• Build a cohesive, high-performing team with strong morale.
• Contribute to hiring efforts and onboard new team members.
• Address concerns promptly and maintain high team engagement.
• Conduct performance reviews and address issues promptly.
• Create growth opportunities and support career progression.
• Remain hands-on with code and critical implementations.
• Make sound architectural decisions for team-owned services.
• Review and guide system designs to align with broader architecture.
• Balance technical debt with feature delivery and maintain code quality.
• Drive operational excellence including on-call processes and incident management.
• Lead incident response and postmortems.
• Ensure reliable delivery with quality standards.
• Introduce new technologies and encourage experimentation.
• Provide DevOps leadership promoting CI/CD discipline, automation, and deployment governance.
• Lead AI engineering maturity, responsible AI adoption, and measurable productivity improvements.
• Collaborate with Product Management to define technical approach and timelines.
• Plan team roadmap balancing technical and product priorities.
• Identify and mitigate team risks; manage dependencies.
• Remove blockers and shield team from distractions.
• Communicate status and decisions to stakeholders.
• Facilitate agile ceremonies and smooth processes.
• Write technical documentation and status updates.

Skills

People leadership

Cloud architecture

DevOps practices

Distributed systems design

API design

Education

Degree or diploma in Computer Science/IT

Tools

CI/CD

IaC

Containers

Observability tools

Cloud platforms

Job description

Sanlam is seeking a senior engineering leader to drive delivery across cloud-native platforms within the Retail Affluent business. You will mentor engineers, steer architectural decisions, and collaborate with product management to align technical roadmaps with business goals.

You will champion DevOps, CI/CD, IaC, and security best practices, lead incident response, and foster AI maturity across solutions, ensuring scalable, reliable systems in a banking/insurance context.