Principal Software Engineer

About this role

<p><strong>Takealot.com</strong>, South Africa’s leading online retailer, is looking for a highly talented Principal Engineer to join the Engineering team based in South Africa.</p> <p>We are a young, dynamic, hyper-growth company looking for smart, creative, hard-working people with integrity to join us!</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Think you’ve been challenged before? Think again!</strong></p> <ul> <li>Scale: 4 million happy shoppers shop online on takealot.com. Show them what you can do.</li> <li>Learn: We work with the best of the best, and then some. Code alongside industry leaders and up-skill in record time.</li> <li>Grow: Expand your career in the fast-growing Takealot Group: <a href="http://takealot.com">takealot.com</a>, Mr D and TFS. We like to promote from within: Here’s your chance.</li> </ul> <h4><strong>Purpose of the role:&nbsp;</strong></h4> <p>Takealot Group operates at an unprecedented scale, powering the e-commerce infrastructure for millions of South Africans through Takealot, Mr D, and TFS. Architecting the future of retail and logistics in Africa requires building hyper-scale, highly available distributed systems that can process immense throughput with zero downtime, while simultaneously pioneering new technological paradigms to unlock new business capabilities.</p> <p>As a Principal Software Engineer, you are a pragmatic visionary and a strategic force multiplier across the engineering organization. You act as the bridge between ambitious business goals and robust technology solutions. Your purpose is to think globally and architect systemically, ensuring platforms scale gracefully while driving technical excellence, leading 0-to-1 greenfield incubation, mitigating systemic risks, and elevating the capabilities of the entire engineering group.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h4><strong>Key responsibilities:</strong>&nbsp;</h4> <ul> <li>Drive Technical Architecture: Lead the design and architecture of highly scalable, available, and secure distributed systems across the Takealot Group.</li> <li>Innovation &amp; Incubation: Lead 0-to-1 engineering initiatives, evaluate emerging technologies, and prove their viability through rapid prototyping to unlock new capabilities.</li> <li>Solve Hard Problems: Functionally decompose complex business and supply chain constraints into simple, elegant, and straightforward technical solutions.</li> <li>Elevate Engineering Standards: Establish, champion, and iterate on group-wide technical standards, actively evangelising technical transformation and shifting organisational paradigms.</li> <li>Lead Cross-Functional Delivery: Serve as the technical authority on our most demanding, cross-departmental projects, fully understanding and mitigating system interdependencies.</li> <li>Mentor and Sponsor: Accelerate the career development of the engineering team by actively mentoring senior engineers and guiding their technical growth.</li> <li>Influence Strategy: Provide objective, data-loaded guidance to executive decision-makers, balancing technical purity with strong business pragmatism.</li> <li>Drive Operational Excellence: Proactively identify systemic risks, monitor technology trends, and champion initiatives that improve platform reliability, performance, and developer velocity.</li> </ul> <h4><strong>Output:&nbsp;</strong></h4> <ul> <li>Highly available, scalable, and secure system architectures that meet business needs.</li> <li>Successful integration and scaling of emerging technologies (0-to-1) into production ecosystems.</li> <li>Group-wide technical standards, architecture documentation, and best practices.</li> <li>Delivery of mission-critical, cross-functional technical projects.</li> <li>A measurable increase in the technical capability and output quality of mentored senior engineers.</li> <li>Strategic technical roadmaps aligned with executive and business goals.</li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h4><strong>Minimum Required Qualification</strong></h4> <ul> <li>Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related technical field.</li> <li>Postgraduate Degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related field (Preferred).</li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h4><strong>Minimum Required Experience</strong></h4> <ul> <li>10+ years of relevant experience in software engineering, relational database internals, and distributed systems.</li> <li>5+ years of technical leadership experience, with a demonstrated ability to influence results-oriented development teams.</li> <li>Proven track record of taking major, large-scale software projects from ideation to production deployment and operational support.</li> <li>Proven track record of driving technical transformation, spearheading greenfield (0-to-1) projects, and successfully evangelising new technologies across a large engineering organisation.</li> <li>Experience influencing a team of developers to deliver highly available and scalable services.</li> <li>Deep domain experience in e-commerce, Supply Chain, Logistics, Machine learning, Web development, IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS.</li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;</p> <h4><strong>Minimum Required Competencies</strong></h4> <ul> <li>Expert-level understanding of advanced data structures, algorithms, and complex system design.</li> <li>Subject Matter Expert on multiple databases, caching, load balancers, message queues, distributed key stores, and high-throughput transaction processing.</li> <li>Deep understanding of coding best practices, system scalability, security, and performance tuning.</li> <li>Demonstrated ability to create a supportive work environment for career and personal development.</li> </ul> <h4><strong>Skills, knowledge &amp; Abilities</strong></h4> <ul> <li>You are a leader, a builder, and an operator who strives for simplicity and demonstrates significant creativity.</li> <li>Excellent interpersonal, verbal, and written communication skills, including the ability to communicate complex technical problems in a simple way to