Tech Lead: SLS: RA: Sanlam Risk & Savings: Bellville

About the Role

The Sanlam Retail Affluent business (SRA) is dedicated to empower South Africans in the middle- and upper-income segments to be financially confident, secure and prosperous. With deep client understanding and a focus on excellence in technology, client and intermediary experiences, SRA delivers financial solutions including comprehensive financial planning, life- and disability insurance, credit solutions, savings and investments, retirement and fiduciary services that can be accessed through various platforms.

Responsibilities

• Sanlam Risk and Savings (SRS), which is one of the businesses within SLS, offers Risk & Savings solutions to various segments within the market.
• Mentor team members on technical skills, career development, and professional growth.
• Provide regular constructive feedback and coach on both technical and soft skills.
• Build a cohesive, high-performing team with strong morale and healthy dynamics.
• Contribute to hiring efforts and effectively onboard new team members.
• Address individual concerns promptly and maintain high team engagement.
• Conduct effective performance reviews and address performance issues promptly.
• Create growth opportunities within the team and support career progression.
• Remain hands-on with code, participating in critical implementations and complex debugging.
• Make sound architectural decisions for team-owned services and components.
• Review and guide the team's system designs, ensuring alignment with broader architecture.
• Balance technical debt with feature delivery and maintain code quality standards.
• Drive the team's operational excellence including on-call processes and incident management.
• Lead the team's incident response and conduct thorough postmortems.
• Ensure the team delivers reliably whilst maintaining quality standards.
• Introduce new technologies to the team and encourage experimentation.
• Provide DevOps leadership by promoting CI/CD discipline, infrastructure automation, deployment governance, and shared accountability for reliable production outcomes.
• Lead AI engineering maturity within the team by encouraging responsible AI adoption, reusable engineering patterns, practical experimentation, and measurable productivity and quality improvements.
• Collaborate with Product Management to define technical approach and delivery timelines.
• Plan team roadmap, balancing technical and product priorities.
• Identify and mitigate team-level risks, managing dependencies with other teams.
• Remove blockers and shield the team from unnecessary distractions.
• Work effectively with Product Management, Business heads and leadership stakeholders.
• Communicate team status, technical decisions, and progress to stakeholders.
• Facilitate agile ceremonies and ensure smooth team processes.
• Implement agile practices and continuously improve team processes.
• Track and improve team metrics including velocity, quality, operational health, and customer experience.
• Ensure the team's service reliability and maintain quality standards.
• Use data to inform decisions and guide improvements.
• Write clear technical documentation and effective status updates.
• Understand product goals and consider ROI in technical decisions.

Requirements

• 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.
• Experience in the banking\insurance industry will be an advantage.
• Strong expertise in modern backend technologies and frontend frameworks.
• Deep understanding of system design, software development methodologies, and modern technology stacks.
• Hands-on coding ability alongside management responsibilities.
• Knowledge of DevOps leadership, including CI/CD, infrastructure automation, deployment governance, observability, and operational excellence.
• AI engineering maturity, including responsible AI adoption, AI ethics knowledge, reusable engineering patterns, practical experimentation, and productivity improvement.
• Delivery and people leadership
• Business acumen
• Risk management
• Communication skills
• Decision quality
• Analytical thinking
• Plans and aligns
• Cultivates innovation
• Optimize work processes
• Customer focus
• Collaborates
• Balances stakeholders
• Drives results
• Team success
• Being resilient
• We’re all about building strong, lasting relationships with our employees. We know that you have hopes for your future
• your career, your personal development and of achieving great things. We pride ourselves in helping our employees to realise their worth. Through its five business clusters
• Sanlam Fintech, Sanlam Life and Savings, Sanlam Investment Group, Sanlam Allianz, Santam, as well as MiWay and the Group Office
• the group provides many opportunities for growth and development.
• The shortlisting process will only start once the application due date has been reached. The time taken to complete this process will depend on how far you progress and the availability of managers.