Tech Lead - Cape Town

We bring together the best in strategic services, user experience and technical delivery using Lean and Agile processes.

Founded in London in 2010 by Stuart, Cain and David, we help large organisations improve their speed to market whilst focusing on delivering value to their users and customers. We work with our clients to understand their problems and validate ideas in order to deliver improved process efficiencies, strategic enhancements and new digital products and services (or make significant improvements to existing ones).

The best bit about Red Badger is, of course, the team. We’ve been around for 10+ years now and we are 120 strong. We are really proud of our people; we support and learn a lot from each other; we work really hard but have fun doing it. We are a diverse group made up of 22 different nationalities, speaking 17 different languages.

Our 3 founders have considerable tech and consultancy experience and still own the company. We’ve been consistently profitable and have grown responsibly from the beginning. We are embarking on the next phase of growth and development.

The role

We’re looking for a Tech Lead to join our new digital product delivery function in Cape Town. Red Badger delivers high-quality digital products using a lean delivery process and multidisciplinary, cross-functional teams.

As a Tech Lead, you will work with one of our amazing Delivery Leads. Together, you will lead your team to deliver high quality software. The work we do for our clients involves dealing with the core complexities of their business and the technology we employ varies from project to project.

You love solving complex problems, and customer value is your north star. You are comfortable consulting with technology stakeholders outside of your team. You are a technology polyglot, and an evangelist for agile ways of working.

Day to day, you will spend roughly half of your time working on code, pairing with engineers on the team, reviewing their code and helping them pick the right design to solve the problem. In the other half, you’ll be supporting the other functions (delivery, product) and our clients with decisions impacted by the technical strategy of the project and providing support and line management to engineers on your team.

Key Responsibilities

Discipline Expertise and Leadership

• Lead a team engineers as part of a cross functional delivery team
• Employ modern development practices to ship high-quality software
• Compare among different technical and design approaches, choosing the right technology for the job
• Ability to adapt to new languages and frameworks
• Start or continue your journey as a line-manager
• Coach & support peers
• Provide support for digital products once they are live (depending on client needs)

Agile Ways of Working

• Run and contribute to agile ceremonies, helping to shape and improve the agile process
• Work with the project’s delivery manager and product owner to lead the team in delivering high quality digital products
• Lead and support your peers in technical conversations
• Be an advocate for lean software development, building for what is required now
• Pair programming with other members of the team, including designers

Consulting with clients

• Own the relationship with the client’s technical stakeholders
• Proactively engage with clients to shape and move the project forward, including giving updates on the delivery progress and highlighting potential technical blockers
• Upskilling and embedding modern software practices in client teams where necessary

Your experience

It’d be great if you have experience with:

• Web frontend and backend technologies (e.g. Typescript, React, Node.JS, Rust, Go, etc.)
• Relational and non-relational databases (e.g. ElasticSearch, Redis, PostgreSQL, etc.)
• System architecture approaches (e.g. microservices, event sourcing, serverless, CQRS…)
• Virtualisation and orchestration tools (e.g. VMs, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.) and infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform, Pulimi)
• CI/CD pipelines (e.g Jenkins, CircleCI, Github Actions, etc.)
• Test automation following Test Driven Development practices including unit testing, API testing, and end-to-end testing
• Understanding design and technical trade-offs, optimising for lean product development and end-user value
• Designing an agile release engineering strategy that delivers value incrementally and continuously
• Supporting a highly-available live production system, responding to alerts, diagnosing problems using logs and observability tooling, triaging and resolving incidents
• Working with lean and agile practices (e.g. Kanban, Scrum, etc.)
• Collaborating in cross-functional teams
• Coaching and line managing software engineers

It’d be amazing if you can also:

• Design, build, debug and help contribute to evolving cloud based architectures following Everything-as-Code principles
• Negotiate SLAs and SLOs with the business and supporting teams
• Help shaping and resourcing technical teams
• Articulate commercial objectives into a technical strategy
• Show a track record of owning the tech leadership on complex engineering projects, setting the technical vision for the project and managing technical stakeholders
• Coach and line manage software engineers who are starting their line management journey
• Be a part of the public face of the company in media and at meetups, conferences, etc.

Red Badger Values:

1. People people
2. We respect and care for each other, giving us the space to feel safe and be our true selves
3. Find a way
4. We’re comfortable with uncertainty and accountability, whilst achieving great outcomes through shared goals
5. Always learning
6. We’re curious. It’s how we learn and grow as individuals, continuously testing and improving what we do, and how we do it
7. Open & Fair
8. We build trust by telling things as they are, being open, and seeking to achieve fair and equitable outcomes.
9. Collaborative
10. We are united by our desire to get to the best ideas. We are generous with our knowledge, actively listen to each other, and are open minded.

Diversity & Inclusion:

Red Badger is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment, and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We hire, employ, train, promote and compensate regardless of gender, gender identity, race, disability, sexual orientation, age, creed and colour. We are fully focused on equality, and it is our fundamental belief that the fascinating characteristics that make us all different enable us to continue to do amazing work for our clients.