Technical Team Lead; Software Development

Clickatell, founded in Cape Town in 2000, was the first company to connect businesses with consumers via SMS using just four lines of code. Today, it powers AI-driven chat commerce for leading global brands across industries like banking, retail, telecoms, and healthcare — including Visa, ABSA, MTN, Toyota, and Pick n Pay. Over 25 years, Clickatell has led multiple industry firsts, such as tokenized Whats App payments, KYC chat banking, and Chat-2-Pay, through its award-winning AI Chat Commerce Platform that enables brands to interact and transact with customers seamlessly.

Senior technical authority for a squad/team, providing architectural direction, solution shaping, and technical clarity. Partners closely with Product to translate business intent into feasible, high-quality technical solutions. Line-manages engineers, fostering growth, cohesion, and predictable delivery. Heavy coding is not expected but remains an option.

Responsibilities of the Role

• People & Leadership

• Line-manage engineers: 1:1s, performance reviews, coaching, hiring, and compensation input.

• Build a psychologically safe, inclusive, high-performance team.

• Manage capacity, workload, and team health in partnership with the Software Development Manager.

• Technical Leadership

• Own team-level architecture, system design, coding standards, and best practices.

• Lead solution design, assess feasibility, risks, and trade-offs.

• Guide engineers during implementation; ensure scalable, secure, and maintainable systems.

• Product Partnership

• Collaborate with Product on refinement and backlog shaping.

• Translate requirements into clear technical stories, estimates, and acceptance criteria.

• Surface dependencies, constraints, and architectural impact early.

• AI-Enabled Development

• Champion effective use of AI tools (e.g., Kiro, Git Hub Copilot).

• Enable safe adoption for documentation, testing, refactoring, and scaffolding.

• Ensure AI output meets quality, security, and maintainability standards.

• Delivery & Operations

• Own technical execution planning, sprint and quarterly planning, and risk management.

• Uphold “you build it, you run it” with production readiness, observability, and runbooks.

• Maintain strong engineering practices, CI/CD, testing, reliability, and documentation.

Requirements

Requirements of the Role

• BSc in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• 2+ experience leading a team
• 6–10+ years software engineering experience
• Experience working with Java or Python as well as a strong grasp of modern frontend technologies
• Proven people management and technical leadership experience.

• Strong architecture, cloud (AWS/Azure), microservices, and CI/CD background.

• Experience enabling teams with AI coding assistants.

• Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Nice to have

• Postgre
  
  SQL, Redis, Kafka/SQS.

• Messaging integrations (Whats App Business API, RCS, SMS).

Benefits

Perks of the Role

• Medical Aid contribution

• Pension fund contribution

• Quarterly performance incentive bonus

• Risk benefit company contributions

• Reimbursable communications allowance for internet and mobile phone bills

• Half-day off on your birthday

• 5 personal days leave a year, over and above your annual leave

• Hybrid working with access to office hubs as required.

• Home office set-up with laptop, monitor and other related items.

Behavioral competency requirements of a Pacesetter:

• Cultivating Talent:
  Partakes in driving the development of skills and strengths within the team and recognizes achievements. Coaches the team on procedures, technical issues, and priorities. Leads and contributes to a positive team environment with open communication and clear goals. Listens to team members’ feedback, resolves any issues, or conflicts and escalates where needed.

• Managing Resources:
  Manages resources optimally by making the right decisions that impacts how resources are used and for what benefit. Accurately estimates, forecast, projects, and monitors available levels of relevant resources and makes the right calls.

• Expert Exchanges:
  Seeks and communicates insights. Acts as access point for…