Platform Engineering Lead (South Africa)

Description

Purpose 

Owns the planning and delivery pipeline for all platform engineering work. Provides real-time visibility, accurate timelines, and reliable execution without managing people. 

Core responsibilities 

• Build and maintain the master roadmap in GitHub Projects/Azure DevOps and Ignite 
• Convert incoming ideas into scoped items with clear acceptance criteria and ETAs 
• Keep a live dashboard that shows status, blockers, and forecast completion dates 
• Run planning sessions, standups, and retros; define sprint cadence as needed 
• Track and report metrics to leadership every week 
• Facilitate documentation of new processes and integrations 
• Organize and deliver training sessions that improve team adoption of the workflow 
• Work with engineers on estimation, planning, and process discipline 
• Perform weekly backlog grooming to merge duplicates, close stale items, and re-confirm priorities with stakeholders 
• Monitor cross-team dependencies and coordinate when projects overlap 
• Maintain a high-level understanding of all active projects so you can step in when an engineer is out 

 

Decision making authority 

• Can adjust ETAs and sequence work to hit goals 
• Escalates capacity conflicts and cross team tradeoffs to Head of Technology 
• Can assign owners to projects and set due dates 
• Can accept and reject new ideas that come though the project pipeline 
• Does not manage people. All managerial tasks and issues are managed by Head of Technology 

 

Mentorship expectations 

• Weekly calls with each engineer to review assignments and ensure tasks are on schedule 
• Daily stand ups 
• Coach engineers on writing thorough notes and status updates 
• Reviews progress and flags issues early 
• Onboard new team members 
• Create and maintain training materials 

Requirements

Required tools and skills 

• Working knowledge of GitHub, Canny and Azure DevOps 
• Working knowledge of modern programming flows 
• Proven ability to break down work, set deadlines, and hit them 
• Strong written communication and meeting facilitation 
• Comfort with EST work hours and remote collaboration 
• Highly organized, reliable, calm under pressure 
• Can influence without authority and drive adoption 

 

 

Experience 

• 2+ years coordinating and/or managing workflows, systems or projects 

 

Expected Outcomes

Success metrics 

• Bugs closed weekly greater than bugs opened weekly 
• Intake to triage within 2 days 
• 1 feature request completed per every 2 weeks 
• Documentation coverage for new and existing deliverables 
• Reopen rate under 5% 
• First 90 days 
• Establish and document intake process 
• Clean and tag all backlog items 
• Create an executive dashboard that gives a high overview of where projects stand. 
• Ensure all projects, tasks and items are in Azure DevOps with due dates on each item, an owner and a full plan 

Compensation & Benefits

None

Interview Process

Apply to the position, upload your resume, and answer the questions in the application. 

1. Upon reviewing your resume, we'll send you an email with a link to a perform a one-way video interview. 
2. Upon reviewing the video interview, we'll email you asking to setup an in-person interview. 
3. After the interview we will email you asking for references. 
4. We will call you letting you know our decision and discuss compensation. 
5. At any point during this process if we feel you will not be a fit, we will let you know, we do not leave applications unanswered!