Software Engineering Team Lead; Fincore Job Cape Town area,South Africa,Software Development

Position: Software Engineering Team Lead (Fincore)

WE ARE BASH

Bash is South Africa's largest omnichannel shopping platform
. We connect over 500 brands across the physical and digital world, for millions of South Africans, every day. We're building something with real scale and real consequence.

We're founder led, a team of true owners and humble learners. We work hard, hold a high bar, and show up for each other. The problems aren't easy and the pace is real but when you break through, the impact is felt across the business and by the customers who rely on us.

If that sounds like the kind of place where you'd do the best work of your career
, we'd like to meet you.

Lead a team that owns core financial products and customer experiences at the heart of commerce.

Help build the financial backbone behind one of South Africa's largest omnichannel transformations. The Fin Core division owns the financial infrastructure and customer experiences behind payments, refunds, credit usage, tokenisation, stored value, reconciliation, and fraud. We're not a fintech incubator dabbling in ideas, and we're not a platform team quietly keeping the lights on. We own these capabilities end to end and are accountable for the systems that reliably scale across every Bash channel.

You'll lead a cross-functional engineering team responsible for Fin Core's financial capabilities. A team usually consists of 5-7 full-stack engineers across backend, web, and mobile, a Team Lead, a Technical Lead and a Product Manager. You'll own your team's people, delivery, and the long-term health of the systems they build. You’ll report to the Engineering Director for Fin Core.

What we mean by "Lead"

You get to see the front. This is not a role where you trade your IDE for a calendar. We're an action-oriented, sleeves-rolled-up business. We expect our leads to contribute to the products they oversee: dig into the codebase, own the dashboards, and jump into incidents with the team. A well-run team should leave you time to do meaningful technical planning and architecting, while still getting the opportunity to write code.

You lead from the back. We want engineers who own their scope, their planning, and their technical decisions. You help set direction, remove obstacles, and step-in with experience when the team is genuinely off track. Empower first; dictate rarely. The fastest way to fail is to act as a glorified Scrum Master: running ceremonies and refining tickets, while the team waits to be told what to do.

You're the team's champion. When the team is under scrutiny from up the chain, you’re there to take the heat. When the team succeeds, you give them the credit. It’s your job to carefully manage expectations, make hard decisions, and advocate for your team and the products they build.

You fix root causes, not symptoms. We'd rather eliminate a whole class of incidents than repeatedly patch the same one. We expect you to push the team toward durable system health: balancing feature work, operations, and risk. Team velocity must survive contact with reality.

You're one half of a leadership pair. Every team is led jointly: you and your Product Manager counterpart. Product owns the problem: the priorities, the direction, and the why. You own the how: delivery, execution, technical quality, and team health. Neither of you runs the team alone, and the strongest teams are the ones where that partnership actually works. Priorities and sequencing will sometimes pull in different directions.

That's when the partnership is tested.

What you'd own

People. Growth and development of each engineer: regular 1-1s, honest feedback, career plans, and creating the kind of environment where people do their best work, grow, and want to stay.

Delivery. Turn priorities into a plan the team can execute: breaking initiatives into tech specs and tickets with the team, sequencing the work, and driving it to completion, without becoming the bottleneck. Coordinate with fellow leads where work crosses team lines.

Technical standards. Advocating for engineering excellence with a pragmatic, product-aware lens. Real code reviews, sound architecture, no rubber-stamping.

Operations. A fair, robust on-call rotation (which you…