Vice President : Software Engineering

Vice President :
Software Engineering

Entersekt Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

Founded over 16 years ago, with more recent investments from Accel-KKR, Entersekt is a leader in digital banking fraud prevention and payment security, including mobile authentication, mobile app security, and 3-D Secure authentication for issuers, acquirers and payment networks.

We offer highly scalable products with a track record of success across multiple continents.

Entersekt enables secure digital transactions for leading financial institutions globally.

We exist to create a world where everyone can transact digitally without fear or compromise.

Currently, we protect the digital transactions of over million active users on our platform and hold active patents that recognize innovation in digital security, payments, and user experience.

Entersekt offers customers secure authentication and digital payments experiences that remove unnecessary friction.

Entersekt has a diverse product portfolio and aggressive roadmap that positions the company well to sustain competitive advantage as it expands globally with emphasis on North America and European markets.

You're a senior engineering leader who has modernised software delivery at scale and knows how to drive consistent engineering excellence across multiple product teams.

You've led transformations involving CI / CD, test automation, progressive delivery, AI-enabled engineering practices, and cloud-native architectures.

You're comfortable influencing a matrixed organisation, setting standards, and guiding POD leaders without direct line authority.

You balance engineering rigour, risk management, and speed, while partnering closely with Product, Architecture, Security, and Platform Engineering.

You enjoy driving clarity, structure, and governance in environments that are scaling quickly, and you have a strong track record of bringing consistency to engineering processes while enabling innovation and autonomy.

The VP of Software Engineering is accountable for enterprise-wide engineering standards, release governance, toolchain strategy, and AI-driven engineering transformation across our product development PODs.

This role serves as the central owner of the SDLC, quality gates, metrics, release patterns, architectural governance, and engineering operating model.

It drives alignment across PODs without initially taking direct line management of engineering team leads, but with clear authority to define, enforce, and continuously improve engineering practices.

You will partner closely with POD Leaders, Product, Architecture, SRE / Platform Engineering, Information Security, and GRC, ensuring our products meet high standards of reliability, security, compliance, and delivery consistency, all while embedding modern engineering practices across the SDLC.

Cross-Functional Leadership – operate as a matrixed leader: influence POD Leaders, Product Management, Architecture, SRE / Platform, and Info Sec; chair an Engineering Standards Council to ratify and evolve practices.

Budget for and govern vendor relationships and tooling investments; establish business cases for modernization.

Engineering Governance & Standards – define, publish, and enforce the enterprise SDLC and development standards (branching, code review, secure coding, documentation), including POD consistent Jira workflows, states, and entry / exit criteria from ideation through production.

Establish Definition of Ready / Done for features and defects; set pre-development conditions of success expected from Product before work begins.

Create quality gates (unit, component, functional, non-functional) and observability baselines and ensure they are uniformly applied across PODs.

Define, monitor, report and implement strategies to continuously improve software engineering and delivery metrics (e.g., FLOW, DORA).

Release & Deployment Management – institutionalise separation of deployment from release to reduce risk and improve flexibility; standardise feature-flag usage, canary and progressive delivery patterns, and kill switches for rapid rollback.

Codify roles:
Engineering…