Technical Software Engineering Manager

Mit Recruitment; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 800 000 - 1 200 000; Full time

Job summary

A fintech company in Cape Town is seeking a Technical Lead to manage and guide software engineering teams. The ideal candidate should have a solid technical background, strong people management skills, and comprehensive knowledge of the payments domain. This role involves mentoring engineers, ensuring delivery of product commitments, and promoting best practices in agile methodology.

Qualifications

• Experience in software engineering and leading technical discussions.
• Track record in performance management, hiring, and conflict resolution.
• Understanding of payment processes and regulatory landscape.

Responsibilities

• Lead the teams towards achieving technical objectives.
• Serve as the primary technical advisor for merchants.
• Engage in code reviews and software development lifecycle.

Skills

Solid Technical expertise

Strong People Management Experience

Payments Domain Knowledge

Competent in Agile Methodologies

Tools

Python

Typescript

React

Terraform

AWS

Jira

Job description

Introduction

Our client is a cutting-edge fintech company shaping the future of digital payments across Africa.

They empower businesses of all sizes - from startups to enterprise merchants - by providing a secure, scalable, and seamless payments infrastructure.

Team Mission

We exist to provide unparalleled support that empowers our teams (called pods) to not only meet but exceed their goals.

We are the dedicated partners to our merchants, ensuring their success through world‑class technical support, and the steadfast advocates for our engineers, fueling their passion and professional growth every single day.

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.

Duties & Responsibilities

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 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.

Ensure 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.

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.

Desired Experience & Qualification

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

Use sprint metrics to drive efficiency and continuous improvement in delivery.

Our Tech Stack

Languages: Python / Typescript / React / (at least 2 of these) 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