Team Lead - Software Development

Ozow is a leading fintech company redefining digital payments in South Africa and beyond. We're dedicated to making payments more accessible, secure, and convenient for businesses and consumers. With a culture of innovation, diversity, and inclusivity, we push the boundaries of what's possible and strive to make a positive impact through our payment solutions.

As the Team Lead, Software Development, you will shape our payments technology ecosystem, lead a team of engineers, drive design and development of high‑quality applications across multiple platforms, and influence the product roadmap in a fast‑moving agile environment.

• Provide technical leadership, guidance, and direction to engineering team members and the broader business.
• Actively engage with development teams across all areas of the software development lifecycle.
• Participate in regular code reviews, ensuring code quality, maintainability, and adherence to best practices.
• Drive standardisation of technologies, development approaches, and architectural patterns across teams.
• Work closely with technical leads, development managers, agile coaches, and the executive team to shape and implement architectural initiatives.
• Actively monitor the software development process and champion continuous improvement.
• Ensure engineering decisions align with fintech regulatory, security, and compliance requirements (e.g., POPIA, PCI‑DSS).
• Advocate for robust system performance, observability, and scalability in high‑volume transaction environments.

• Work with your development team to deliver high‑quality software solutions within agreed timelines.
• Understand interdependencies between work items, squads, and platform components, ensuring smooth cross‑team collaboration.
• Liaise with agile coaches and product owners to resolve team impediments, support sprint flow, and improve delivery cadence.
• Own sprint health and contribute to backlog refinement, capacity planning, and sprint planning activities.
• Proactively identify delivery risks and drive mitigation strategies.
• Engage with cross‑functional teams such as Product, QA, Infrastructure, Security, Data, and Support to enable seamless delivery.

• Promote best practices such as continuous integration, continuous deployment, test‑driven development, and automated testing.
• Ensure systems are reliable, secure, and scalable — especially in the payments ecosystem.
• Champion monitoring, alerting, and incident management practices.
• Oversee root cause analysis (RCA) processes and drive long‑term solutions for recurring issues.
• Ensure adherence to internal SLAs and uptime expectations for mission‑critical payment services.

• Mentor and develop engineers through knowledge sharing, pairing, and structured feedback.
• Promote a culture of learning, experimentation, and engineering excellence.
• Impart emerging trends, tools, and industry practices to the team.
• Take an active role in performance discussions, career development planning, and growth pathways for developers.
• Foster psychological safety and a collaborative, accountable team culture.

• Keep up to date with emerging technologies, industry trends, and patterns within the global payments and fintech ecosystem.
• Drive the adoption of modern frameworks, cloud‑native practices, and platform enhancements that benefit long‑term scalability.
• Contribute to shaping the technical roadmap to support rapid scale, new product lines, and cross‑border expansion.
• Encourage innovation through PoCs, hackathons, or experimentation cycles.

• 7+ years in software development experience
• Must have relevant IT Diploma or Degree
• Experience working with agile methodologies – a true believer
• Have a strong understanding of digital product offerings and the development thereof
• Solid understanding of microservices architecture, distributed systems, APIs, and event‑driven design
• Expertise in CI/CD, automated testing, and Dev Ops‑aligned practices
• Hands‑on experience with cloud platforms (AWS or Azure)
• Familiar…