WFS Senior Manager Development and DevOps

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.

• 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

• Resilience & Agility –

Thrives in fast-paced, change-driven environments

TECHNICAL EXPERTISE

• Languages:

JavaScript/TypeScript, C#, Python, Java, Go, Swift, Kotlin

• Frameworks:

Node.js, .NET Core, Angular, React, Spring Boot

• Low-code

platforms (e.g. OutSystems)

• Cloud

Platforms: AWS, Azure, GCP (including deep knowledge of the cloud platforms services)

• CI/CD:

Jenkins, Bitbucket pipelines

• IaC:

Terraform

• Containers:

Docker, Kubernetes, Helm

• Monitoring:

Grafana, ELK Stack, DataDog

• Version

Control: Git, GitHub, GitLab

• Agile

Tools: Jira, Confluence

MINIMUM QUALIFICATION

• Computer Science/Information

Systems/Mathematics/Engineering degree

• AWS/Azure certifications

EXPERIENCE REQUIRED

• 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:

· CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Jenkins, BitBucket pipelines)

· 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.