Principal Telco Platform Engineer

Team: Telco / Dev Ops

Reports to: Head of Dev Ops (Louis Gouws)

Our client is seeking a Principal Telco Platform Engineer to lead the design, integration, and delivery of all network-facing systems within the company’s telco domain. This is a senior technical leadership role combining hands-on architecture and engineering with team leadership of five direct reports across BSS integration, billing, OSS, device management, and portal/API development. The successful candidate will own the technical direction of the telco stack, including the BSS integration programme, customer portal platforms, provisioning and service assurance systems, and the API layer connecting network operations to business systems.

They will also provide technical oversight of the outsourced system builds, ensuring alignment with the company’s architecture standards and integration patterns. This role requires someone who has operated as a technical design authority or tech lead in a telecom or network service provider environment, with deep backend engineering capability and a track record of building distributed, API-driven platforms  principal must be equally comfortable making architectural decisions, writing production code, mentoring engineers, and managing vendor delivery.

• Own the end-to-end technical architecture for the telco section, covering BSS, OSS, billing, provisioning, and customer-facing portal systems
• Define integration patterns, API contracts, and data flow standards across the telco platform stack
• Make architectural decisions and document them through Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), functional specifications, and integration design documents
• Establish and enforce coding standards, code review practices, and quality gates across the telco engineering team
• Align telco platform architecture with TM Forum Open API standards where applicable
• Collaborate with the Head of Dev Ops on cross-domain architectural decisions that span telco and enterprise systems

• Design and build integrations between BSS and OSS systems including billing (Sage), order management, and Service Now
• Develop and maintain RESTful APIs for inter-system communication, ensuring resilience, idempotency, and fault tolerance
• Build middleware and orchestration layers to support complex telco business processes (provisioning, service activation, order fulfilment)
• Implement event-driven architectures using message queues (RabbitMQ, Kafka, or similar) for asynchronous system communication
• Develop observability pipelines including logging, metrics, alerting, and dashboarding for telco platform health
• Ensure data consistency and integrity across integrated systems through validation, error handling, and reconciliation logic

• Lead and technically mentor a team of five engineers:
  Billing Systems Developer, OSS Systems Developer, UE Management Specialist, and API/Portal Backend Developer
• Drive sprint planning, backlog grooming, and technical prioritisation within the telco section in collaboration with the Scrum Master
• Conduct code reviews, architecture reviews, and technical design sessions with the team
• Identify skill gaps within the team and support professional development through coaching, pair programming, and knowledge transfer

• Provide technical oversight of the outsourced system builds (CSM/SOM modules), ensuring the third-party delivery aligns with the company’s integration architecture and quality standards
• Act as the primary technical interface between the telco engineering team and internal stakeholders (network operations, field engineering, service delivery)
• Collaborate with…