Lead, Technology

Company Description

Standard Bank Group is a leading Africa-focused financial services group, and an innovative player on the global stage, that offers a variety of career-enhancing opportunities – plus the chance to work alongside some of the sector’s most talented, motivated professionals. Our clients range from individuals, to businesses of all sizes, high net worth families and large multinational corporates and institutions. We’re passionate about creating growth in Africa. Bringing true, meaningful value to our clients and the communities we serve and creating a real sense of purpose for you.

Job Description

To shape, plan, lead portfolio delivery providing expert Engineering skill, directing system capabilities, priorities, resources ensuring solutions are developed, maintained to standards practices. To synthesize, mature engineering practices (software; quality; change & release; DevOPS) across portfolio delivery teams (5-12 teams). Lead, manage resources: software; quality engineers, technical system team (50-80 resources), building capacity, capability, competencies in Engineering team.

• Advise, maintain and implement the Engineering standards, methods and procedures across Portfolio to ensure a consistent and best practice approach in the development of end-to-end solutions.
• Collaborate with Platform Owners in ensuring that the platform is engineered to be secure, meet service level objectives in terms of availability, reliability and performance. Set-up appropriate processes to quality assure all code deployed onto the platform.
• Conduct quality assurance and approve developed code linked to supplied specifications and ensure  that applications are built in line with continuous delivery/ continuous integration standards.
• Continuously develop and mature competency of the Engineering team by overseeing the provision of support in the form of training, mentoring, coaching, etc. for practice team members to allow them to attain mastery in their technical skills. Collaborate and create opportunities for team members to acquire adjacent skills (T-shaped employees ) and emergent skills as well as actively driving cross skilling as a strategic initiative in conjunction with other technology engineering practices.
• Contribute deep, specialist knowledge of the technological landscape to the team, thereby developing and enhancing the technical capabilities of the team, and building a pipeline of expertise.

Qualifications

• Post Graduate Degree - Information Technology (Required)
• Post Graduate Degree - Information Studies (Preferred)
• Post Graduate Degree - Information Technology (Preferred)

Additional Information

Experience Required

8-10 years: Proven ability to work effectively as both a team leader and as a member of a small team of technical staff working in an agile development environment. Track record in capability and competency building and coaching of staff is required. Minimum 3-5 years' experience as a senior manager running a portfolio of 10+ technical experts.

More than 10 years: Come from a background of full lifecycle design and development covering solution design, application design, development, testing and maintenance, network software, operating systems, multi-tier environments, desktop and workgroup software, middleware, server technology, fault tolerant environments, development tools. Broad experience of application development methodologies, data base methodology, programming languages, data base concepts and IT infrastructure and operations.

More than 10 years: Extensive experience in stakeholder management, with a focus on building strong relationships between technology and business units. Skilled in presenting complex technical concepts to non-technical audiences and influencing decision-making at the executive level. Knowledge of Agile and Lean frameworks, methods and practices and experience in being a catalyst for organisational change. Experience working with cross-functional teams fostering collaboration and team work. Exposure to broad business and financial management type experience, specifically within the banking sector. Good understanding of the Standard Bank IT environment

More than 10 years: Demonstrated ability to lead the architecture and development of scalable, high-performance systems. Expertise in cloud technologies, microservices architecture, and containerization (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker). Experience in deploying and managing large-scale distributed systems in a cloud environment (AWS or Azure).

8-10 years: Experience in mentoring and developing technical leaders, with a focus on building a culture of continuous learning and improvement. Demonstrated ability to drive diversity and inclusion within technical teams, fostering a collaborative and innovative environment.

8-10 years: Experience in driving the adoption of DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and automation tools to enhance software delivery and operational efficiency.