Platform Engineering Lead

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Role Purpose/Business Unit:

The Platform Engineering Lead owns the build, reliability and continuous evolution of the group data platform on which all Big Data analytics and machine learning workloads run. The role leads the platform engineering team and is accountable for platform delivery and operational excellence across a multi-market estate of roughly four petabytes, providing the stable, governed and cost-efficient foundation that data science and commercial delivery squads consume.

This is a people-leadership role that combines technical direction with delivery and operational accountability. Its value is measured by platform reliability, delivery predictability, engineering quality and the growth of the team.

Position in the team

The role leads the platform and capability side of the BD&A operating model, which is deliberately separated from the commercial delivery squads so that platform capability is built and operated to a consistent standard and then consumed by delivery teams.

• It reports to the Group Head, Big Data, AI/ML and Cloud Technology, and is accountable for the health of the group data platform.
• It line-manages the platform engineering team and owns the data and platform engineering chapter.
• It partners as a peer with the Data Architect, the ML Lead and the data science / RTE delivery lead.
• It serves the data science delivery train and commercial delivery squads as internal customers of the platform.

Your responsibilities will include:

Platform strategy and roadmap

• Own and evolve the data platform roadmap, aligned to the BD&A technology strategy and the Group Commercial AI pillars.
• Prioritise platform investment across new capability, technical debt reduction and reliability, and defend those trade-offs to leadership.
• Drive the data lakehouse direction, including the data virtualisation strategy and data governance.
• Sequence platform initiatives with the delivery train so platform capability lands ahead of the use cases that depend on it.

Engineering delivery and practices

• Lead platform engineering delivery through PI and sprint planning, holding the team to committed outcomes.
• Own and enforce engineering standards: infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, automated testing, code review and documentation.
• Institutionalise data contracts, embedded quality gates and observability as first-class platform capabilities rather than after-the-fact checks.
• Ensure ingestion, transformation and serving are built to standard.
• Instil an engineering culture of ownership, craft and ruthless simplification.

Platform reliability and operations

• Own platform availability, performance and service levels across all markets.
• Run incident and problem management for platform faults, with clear accountability across Group and local market middleware teams (Zero Call Error and Platform Error fault domains).
• Shift the team from reactive firefighting to proactive observability and anomaly detection.
• Drive out structural data-quality root causes at source rather than downstream.

Team leadership and capability

• Line-manage platform engineers: set objectives, coach, give feedback and manage performance.
• Build engineering capability through hiring, skills development and chapter health.
• Develop technical leadership beneath the role, including mentoring the Solution Architect and senior engineers.
• Create an environment that attracts and retains strong engineers.

Cost, security, governance and vendors

• Own the platform cloud cost envelope and drive FinOps discipline across compute and storage.
• Ensure security-by-default (least-privilege access through Lake Formation, encryption) and regulatory compliance.
• Manage platform vendor and cloud relationships (AWS, Starburst, Collibra), including contracts and roadmaps, in concert with SCM.

The ideal candidate for this role will have:

Essential

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems or a related discipline.
• Roughly 7+ years in data or software engineering, including at least 3 to 5 years leading engineering teams.
• Proven delivery and operation of production data platforms at scale on AWS.
• Demonstrable people-leadership track record: hiring, developing and retaining engineers.

Preferred

• AWS certification at professional or specialty level.
• Experience operating across multiple countries or regulatory jurisdictions.
• Telecommunications or large-enterprise data platform experience.
• Exposure to data virtualisation (Starburst) and governance tooling (Collibra).

Technical environment

The role leads engineering across the following stack:

• Cloud and storage: AWS; Amazon S3 ; ingestion from on-premise sources into the cloud landing zone.
• Processing and orchestration: AWS Glue (ETL), Amazon EMR.
• Governance and access: AWS Lake Formation, Collibra (data governance and cataloguing).
• ML enablement: Amazon SageMaker, Feature Store (the ML layer the platform underpins).
• Operating model: platform and capability teams separated from commercial delivery squads; software and ML engineering chapters; PI and sprint planning cadence.

Core competencies, knowledge, and experience:

• Deep data platform and distributed systems engineering.
• DataOps and DevOps: infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, automated testing.
• Platform reliability engineering: service levels, observability, incident management.
• Data governance, security and regulatory compliance (POPIA, cross-border residency).
• FinOps and cloud cost management at scale.

Leadership competencies

• People leadership: coaching, developing and managing the performance of an engineering team.
• Delivery leadership: agile at scale, PI planning and disciplined prioritisation.
• Operational composure: decisive and calm under incident pressure.
• Stakeholder influence across commercial, delivery, governance and local market teams.
• Systems thinking with a strong bias toward simplification.

We make an impact by offering:

• Enticing incentive programs and competitive benefit packages
• Retirement funds, risk benefits, and medical aid benefits
• Cell phone and data benefits, advantages fibre connection discounts, and exclusive staff discounts offered in collaboration with partner companies

Closing date for Applications: 07 September 2026.

The base location for this role is Midrand, Vodacom Campus.

The company's approved Employment Equity Plan and Targets will be considered as part of the recruitment process. As an Equal Opportunities employer, we actively encourage and welcome people with various disabilities to apply.

Vodacom is committed to an organisational culture that recognises, appreciates, and values diversity & inclusion.