Technical Leadership – Able to guide deep technical discussions and make strategic trade-offs
People Management – Skilled at growing, mentoring, and leading high-performing teams
Strategic Thinking – Aligns technical roadmap with business vision
Collaboration – Works effectively across cross-functional teams and stakeholders
Problem Solving – Handles complex technical and operational issues with a calm, analytical mindset
Resilience & Agility – Thrives in fast-paced, change-driven environments
10+ years of software development experience, including at least 3–5 years in DevOps
3 - 5 years technical leadership/management experience
Deep understanding of software architecture patterns (microservices, event-driven, monolith-to-modular transition)
10 years IT experience
8 Years of solid cloud experience (AWS, Azure, GCP)
Hands-on experience with:
Full description
**Woolworths Financial Services follows a Work-in-Hybrid work structure which requires employees to work from home for the majority of their time with some rotation into office.MAIN PURPOSE:**
The purpose of this role is to lead the Developers and DevOps professionals and provide leadership to the WFS Digital Factory.
This would include but not limited to embedment of standards, quality and best practices, security, reporting, configuration and build, testing, planning, and deployment of solutions. The incumbent will be accountable for all aspects of deployment and technical operations including technical project resources (partners/subcontractors or staff), scheduling, risk management, internal and external communication to stakeholders, status reporting, and resource management. The individual will also be required to set direction for the area and be responsible for driving operational excellence.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:Strategy and Leadership
Define
and execute the Development and DevOps vision and strategy aligned to broader IT and business goals.
Develop
long-term roadmaps for team capacity, systems scalability, and platform reliability.
Lead
cross-functional teams with a focus on engineering culture, DevOps adoption, and agile maturity.
Serve
as a key decision-maker for application architecture, tooling, and development standards.
Lead hiring, mentoring, and performance
management across development and DevOps roles.
Act as a liaison between software
engineering, QA, operations, infrastructure, and cybersecurity teams.
Collaborate and support the development
of the digital strategy and plan
Software Development Oversight
Manage full software development
lifecycle (SDLC) including design, development, code review, testing, release, and maintenance.
Oversee engineering quality assurance,
ensuring coding standards, test coverage, and secure coding practices.
Coordinate with product management and
stakeholders to ensure timely, on-scope delivery.
WFS Senior Manager Development and DevOps at Woolworths Financial Services (Remote) — aijobsearch
Facilitate agile ceremonies and champion
lean/agile practices (e.g., Scrum, SAFe, or Kanban).
Be involved in the Lower-Level solution
design in collaboration with the Solution Architect
DevOps Engineering and Infrastructure
Oversee CI/CD pipeline development and
maintenance using tools such as Jenkins, Bitbucket, GitHub, Sonarqube, Tenable.io, Terraform, QA test framework, etc.
Champion infrastructure as code (IaC)
practices using Terraform, etc.
Implement and maintain containerization
and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, ECS/EKS)
Lead efforts for observability —
monitoring, logging, alerting, and APM (e.g., Grafana, ELK, DataDog, etc.)
Collaborate with Information Security to
embed DevSecOps practices.
Manage public/hybrid cloud platforms
(AWS, Azure, GCP) for application hosting, deployment, and scaling.
Automate manual operational tasks
Be involved in the Lower-Level solution
design in collaboration with the Solution Architect
Governance, Risk and Compliance
Establish change management controls and
deployment governance in line with ITIL or equivalent frameworks
Present progress reports, risk
assessments, and incident post-mortems to senior stakeholders
Ensure appropriate documentation for
software, environments, and infrastructure.
Maintain audit-readiness and support
internal and external compliance assessments
Manage costs according to budget, as it
relates to technology, people and process
**Key KPI’s and Metrics**
Deployment frequency: Time-to-market for new releases
Change failure rate: % of changes that result in service
incidents
Mean time to recovery (MTTR): Average time to recover from
incidents
Uptime / SLA adherence: Application availability and
performance
Automation coverage: % of infrastructure managed as code
Code quality: Test coverage, bug rate, code review
compliance
Team engagement: Retention, satisfaction, and professional
growth of team members
Requirements
KEY COMPETENCIES:
Technical Leadership – Able
to guide deep technical discussions and make strategic trade-offs
People Management – Skilled
at growing, mentoring, and leading high-performing teams
Strategic Thinking – Aligns
technical roadmap with business vision
Collaboration – Works
effectively across cross-functional teams and stakeholders
Problem Solving – Handles
complex technical and operational issues with a calm, analytical mindset
· Containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
· Public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP)
· Infrastructure-as-Code tools (e.g., Terraform)
· Strong background in agile delivery and lean product development, as well as Waterfall, and hybrid of these.
Experience working in regulated industries (e.g.,
banking)
Experience in leading Native Mobile application
development (e.g. iOS, Android, Hybrid)
**Woolworths Financial Services is a proud South African brand, who is committed to transformation. Meeting our employment equity goals will be taken into account in our recruitment decisions. **