Job Description

Meet Ozow
Ozow is a leading fintech company that's redefining digital payments in South Africa and beyond. We're dedicated to making payments more accessible, secure, and convenient for both businesses and consumers. As a fast-growing player in the financial technology sector, Ozow fosters a culture of innovation, diversity, and inclusivity. We believe in pushing the boundaries of what's possible and are committed to making a positive impact on the world through our payment solutions.
More about this Ozow fantastic position
As the Team Lead, Software Development, you will play a key role in shaping our payments technology ecosystem. Leading a team of talented engineers, you'll drive the design and development of high-quality applications across multiple platforms. Working in a fast-moving agile environment, you'll influence the product roadmap, champion engineering best practices such as CI/CD and TDD, and mentor developers to consistently deliver strong sprint outcomes. Success in this role requires proven leadership and a track record of delivering software projects under tight deadlines.
Your role and responsibilities
Technical Leadership & Engineering Excellence

• Provide technical leadership, guidance, and direction to engineering team members and the broader business.
• Actively engage with development teams across all areas of the software development lifecycle.
• Participate in regular code reviews, ensuring code quality, maintainability, and adherence to best practices.
• Drive standardisation of technologies, development approaches, and architectural patterns across teams.
• Work closely with technical leads, development managers, agile coaches, and the executive team to shape and implement architectural initiatives.
• Actively monitor the software development process and champion continuous improvement.
• Ensure engineering decisions align with fintech regulatory, security, and compliance requirements (e.g., POPIA, PCI-DSS).
• Advocate for robust system performance, observability, and scalability in high-volume transaction environments.

Delivery Management & Agile Execution

• Work with your development team to deliver high-quality software solutions within agreed timelines.
• Understand interdependencies between work items, squads, and platform components, ensuring smooth cross-team collaboration.
• Liaise with agile coaches and product owners to resolve team impediments, support sprint flow, and improve delivery cadence.
• Own sprint health and contribute to backlog refinement, capacity planning, and sprint planning activities.
• Proactively identify delivery risks and drive mitigation strategies.
• Engage with cross-functional teams such as Product, QA, Infrastructure, Security, Data, and Support to enable seamless delivery.

Quality, Stability & Operational Excellence

• Promote best practices such as continuous integration, continuous deployment, test-driven development, and automated testing.
• Ensure systems are reliable, secure, and scalable - especially in the payments ecosystem.
• Champion monitoring, alerting, and incident management practices.
• Oversee root cause analysis (RCA) processes and drive long-term solutions for recurring issues.
• Ensure adherence to internal SLAs and uptime expectations for mission-critical payment services.

People Leadership, Coaching, & Mentorship

• Mentor and develop engineers through knowledge sharing, pairing, and structured feedback.
• Promote a culture of learning, experimentation, and engineering excellence.
• Impart emerging trends, tools, and industry practices to the team.
• Take an active role in performance discussions, career development planning, and growth pathways for developers.
• Foster psychological safety and a collaborative, accountable team culture.

Innovation & Strategic Contribution

• Keep up to date with emerging technologies, industry trends, and patterns within the global payments and fintech ecosystem.
• Drive the adoption of modern frameworks, cloud-native practices, and platform enhancements that benefit long-term scalability.
• Contribute to shaping the technical roadmap to support rapid scale, new product lines, and cross-border expansion.
• Encourage innovation through PoCs, hackathons, or experimentation cycles.

You are an ideal candidate if you have

• 7+ years in software development experience
• Must have relevant IT Diploma or Degree
• Experience working with agile methodologies - a true believer.
• Have a strong understanding of digital product offerings and the development thereof
• Solid understanding of microservices architecture, distributed systems, APIs, and event-driven design.
• Expertise in CI/CD, automated testing, and DevOps-aligned practices.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS or Azure).
• Familiarity with secure coding principles and best practices.
• Experience building scalable, resilient systems handling large transaction volumes (ideal for payments).
• Demonstrated ability to mentor, guide, and upskill software engineers.
• Excellent communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Your skills and competencies

• You eagerly embrace change, absorb cross-functional skills, and connect ideas across disciplines to drive fresh thinking and innovation.
• Ability to initiate, develop, maintain and leverage outstanding relationships to influence a wide network, both inside and outside the company.
• A trailblazer who steps up, takes charge, and creates meaningful impact-those driven by performance and purpose to lead from the front and make a real difference every day.
• You thrive in collaboration, embrace inclusion, and bring a genuine curiosity for global cultures-valuing collective success over individual credit.
• Demonstrate strategic foresight, sound judgement, and the ability to make confident decisions under uncertainty, always working toward the best possible outcomes.
• You challenge norms, champion innovation, and constantly seek growth-for themselves, their team, and the solutions they build.
• You are a decisive doer-those who take initiative, follow through with confidence, and ensure results through courageous, hands-on leadership.
• We value optimism, agility, and the strength to persevere under pressure-balancing performance with positivity, even in challenging environments.
• You are driven, proactive individuals who take ownership, face challenges with grit, and consistently push for excellence-not just as participants, but as catalysts for success.

Interview process
During the interview process you will meet with the People team, the hiring manager, and relevant CSuite. Be prepared to complete a technical assessment that will showcase your skills.
In office perks

• Healthy breakfast, lunches and snacks
• Monthly team connects
• On-site Barista
• Birthday Leave

Perks for South African based employees

• Medical aid subsidy
• Group Risk Insurance
• Generous paid annual leave
• Birthday leave
• Learning and Development opportunities
• Mentorship programme
• Quarterly team building
• Community initiatives
• Access to cutting edge technology -

Our Employee Value Proposition
Join Ozow and become part of an elite force that challenges the ordinary and achieves the extraordinary. If you're driven to make an impact, embrace challenges, and seek unparalleled opportunities for growth, your journey starts here.
Compliance
As a fintech company, we prioritize data security, confidentiality, regulatory and compliance. Due to the sensitive nature of our work, we require individuals with a high level of integrity and trustworthiness to ensure adherence to financial regulations and industry standards. Given the sensitive nature of our work, all employees are expected to demonstrate professionalism, accountability, and a commitment to ethical conduct in line with financial regulations and industry standards
Ready to be exceptional? Apply now!
Keen to know more?
Interested in joining our rocket ship?
To find out more about life at Ozow, head over to our Careers Page

Skills Required