Principal Engineer

**Takealot.com**, South Africa’s leading online retailer, is looking for a highly talented Principal Engineer to join the Engineering team based in South Africa.

We are a young, dynamic, hyper-growth company looking for smart, creative, hard-working people with integrity to join us!

Think you’ve been challenged before? Think again!

- Scale: 4 million happy shoppers shop online on takealot.com. Show them what you can do.

- Learn: We work with the best of the best, and then some. Code alongside industry leaders and up-skill in record time.

- Grow: Expand your career in the fast-growing Takealot Group: takealot.com, Mr D and TFS. We like to promote from within: Here’s your chance.

• Drive Technical Architecture: Lead the design and architecture of highly scalable, available, and secure distributed systems across the Takealot Group.
• Innovation & Incubation: Lead 0-to-1 engineering initiatives, evaluate emerging technologies, and prove their viability through rapid prototyping to unlock new capabilities.
• Solve Hard Problems: Functionally decompose complex business and supply chain constraints into simple, elegant, and straightforward technical solutions.
• Elevate Engineering Standards: Establish, champion, and iterate on group-wide technical standards, actively evangelising technical transformation and shifting organisational paradigms.
• Lead Cross-Functional Delivery: Serve as the technical authority on our most demanding, cross-departmental projects, fully understanding and mitigating system interdependencies.
• Mentor and Sponsor: Accelerate the career development of the engineering team by actively mentoring senior engineers and guiding their technical growth.
• Influence Strategy: Provide objective, data-loaded guidance to executive decision-makers, balancing technical purity with strong business pragmatism.
• Drive Operational Excellence: Proactively identify systemic risks, monitor technology trends, and champion initiatives that improve platform reliability, performance, and developer velocity.

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Postgraduate Degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related field (Preferred).
• 10+ years of relevant experience in software engineering, relational database internals, and distributed systems.
• 5+ years of technical leadership experience, with a demonstrated ability to influence results-oriented development teams.
• Proven track record of taking major, large-scale software projects from ideation to production deployment and operational support.
• Proven track record of driving technical transformation, spearheading greenfield (0-to-1) projects, and successfully evangelising new technologies across a large engineering organisation.
• Experience influencing a team of developers to deliver highly available and scalable services.
• Deep domain experience in e-commerce, Supply Chain, Logistics, Machine learning, Web development, IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS.
• Expert-level understanding of advanced data structures, algorithms, and complex system design.
• Ability to create a supportive work environment for career and personal development.