Technical Lead (Cape Town)

Red Badger delivers high-quality digital products using a lean delivery process and multidisciplinary, cross-functional teams. The Tech Lead brings deep experience building and operating digital products, particularly in complex client environments and multi-team programmes.

This role is central to delivering high-quality outcomes through hands-on technical leadership, strong decision-making, and practical delivery experience. Our client has many corporate websites (Hiring/Investor relations, etc.) that run on a CMS called Optimizely. This project is about consolidating these sites where possible (presenting viable options and validation as outputs from the discovery phase), and then implementing a rebrand (new designs and a design system already exist) across the remaining websites in the production phase.

You will work closely with Product and Delivery, as well as other technical leads and senior stakeholders, to ensure that technology choices align with client goals and Red Badger’s value propositions.

You will consult and influence on technology adoption, continuous delivery, engineering practices, team structure, deployment strategy, and organisational policy. Your ability to guide teams and clients through emerging technologies and industry best practices will help teams deliver with autonomy and impact.

Day to day, you will spend roughly half your time coding-pairing with engineers, reviewing code, and helping the team choose the right designs. The rest of your time will be spent supporting product, delivery, and client stakeholders on technical decisions and providing support and management to engineers.

Key Responsibilities

Discipline Expertise and Leadership

• Lead a team of engineers as part of a cross-functional delivery team
• Employ modern development practices to ship high-quality software
• Compare different technical and design approaches, choosing the right technology for the job
• Ability to adapt to new languages and frameworks
• Start or continue your journey as a line manager
• Coach and support peers
• Provide support for digital products once they are live (depending on client needs) 

Agile Ways of Working

• Run and contribute to agile ceremonies, helping to shape and improve the agile process
• Work with the project’s delivery manager and product owner to lead the team in delivering high-quality digital products
• Lead and support your peers in technical conversations
• Be an advocate for lean software development, building for what is required now
• Pair programming with other members of the team, including designers

Consulting with clients

• Own the relationship with the client’s technical stakeholders
• Proactively engage with clients to shape and move the project forward, including giving updates on the delivery progress and highlighting potential technical blockers
• Upskilling and embedding modern software practices in client teams where necessary

Your experience 

It’d be great if you have experience with:

• Web frontend and backend technologies (e.g. Typescript, React, Node.JS, Rust, Go, etc.)
• Relational and non-relational databases (e.g. ElasticSearch, Redis, PostgreSQL, etc.)
• System architecture approaches (e.g. microservices, event sourcing, serverless, CQRS…)
• Virtualisation and orchestration tools (e.g. VMs, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.) and infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform, Pulimi)
• CI/CD pipelines (e.g Jenkins, CircleCI, Github Actions, etc.)
• Test automation following Test Driven Development practices, including unit testing, API testing, and end-to-end testing
• Understanding design and technical trade-offs, optimising for lean product development and end-user value
• Designing an agile release engineering strategy that delivers value incrementally and continuously
• Supporting a highly available live production system, responding to alerts, diagnosing problems using logs and observability tooling, triaging and resolving incidents
• Working with lean and agile practices (e.g. Kanban, Scrum, etc.)
• Collaborating in cross-functional teams
• Coaching and line managing software engineers

It’d be amazing if you can also: 

• Design, build, debug and help contribute to evolving cloud-based architectures following Everything-as-Code principles
• Negotiate SLAs and SLOs with the business and supporting teams
• Help shape and resource technical teams
• Articulate commercial objectives into a technical strategy
• Show a track record of owning the tech leadership on complex engineering projects, setting the technical vision for the project and managing technical stakeholders
• Coach and line manage software engineers who are starting their line management journey
• Be part of the company's public face in media and at meetups, conferences, etc.

Diversity and Inclusion

Red Badger is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment, and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We hire, employ, train, promote and compensate regardless of gender, gender identity, race, disability, sexual orientation, age, creed and colour. We are fully focused on equality, and we believe the fascinating characteristics that make us all different enable us to continue doing amazing work for our clients.