What will you do?

• We’re on a transformation journey to be an innovative company at the forefront of the financial services industry’s digital transformation. By harnessing advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), we aim to redefine the financial landscape with intelligent, advice led solutions. To do this, we need to be a net producer of technology, rather than a net consumer and engineering leaders are a critical part of this mission.  
• Reporting to the Group Data & ML Platform Tech Lead, this is an engineering leadership role focusing on empowering and accelerating autonomous value creation through Insights and ML across Sanlam Group. With your mastery of engineering, your expertise in Data & ML Platforms and your experience of building and leading high performing, autonomous technology teams, you’ll ensure business teams across the group make data a source of competitive for them in their markets.

What will make you successful in this role?

What success will look like for you 12 months into the role.

Build a configurable data ingestion platform to collect and protect data from any on-prem or cloud-based source within two weeks or less: 

• Through a mixture of building and buying, you’ve assembled a tool suite of ingestion tools, optimized for cost efficiency and reliability. Success will be measured by the consistent achievement of the two-week ingestion target while maintaining high reliability and security.

Build a high performing engineering team : 

• You’ve built a lean, high-ownership, high-agency teams with clear missions and success metrics and ensured continuous performance improvement each month. Success was measured by the consistent delivery against your service level objectives (e.g. new data acquired from any source in 2 weeks or less) and the achievement of your yearly OKR’s. 

Define and measure team success :

• Define or refine success metrics and Service Level Objectives (SLO’s) for your part of the platform to cover adoption, satisfaction, cost as well and reliability. Service Level Indicators (SLI’s) such as accuracy, recency and latency. Inspire your entire team to take full ownership of their performance as measured through these metrics. Success will be measured by the continuous improvement of performance the metrics as well as unanimous approval of their definitions.

Ensure your teams have everything they need to be successful :

• Identify the capability (i.e. skills) and capacity (i.e. enough of them) your team needs to be successful, with little dependency on other teams throughout execution. Think holistically, from data science and research to design and engineering. Attract, hire and onboard all talent you identify in your planning. Success will be measured by team delivery and satisfaction, as well as the number of new hires who meet our high-performance expectations on their 12 month anniversary. 

Ensure the team has what they need from other teams and contract with the other teams :

• Contract with the other teams you depend on to ensure clear boundaries and high performance to the level you need to enable your own high performance. Success will be measured by the absence of externally imposed blockers based on things the team can (or should) control.

Cultivate and maintain a culture of excellence and continuous improvement fostering : 

• Foster a culture of ownership, curiosity, and continuous learning in your teams. Work with the delivery lead to carry out pre and post-mortems, sharing lessons learned across the organization along with how you are improving based on those lessons. Championed the development of your direct reports and teams, as they self-assess and develop their own individual learnings. Success will be measured by the continuous growth of practices and individual excellence in the team. 

Qualification

• Matric
• National Diploma in an Information Technology related discipline or a bachelor’s degree in computer science, Statistics, Informatics, Information Systems, or a quantitative field will be recommended.

Experience

• 7+ years’ experience in leading engineering teams with at least 2 in a modern context with cloud technologies and autonomous high performing team organisational patterns
• A track record of high impact and investing in your own development