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.

Purpose of the role

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.

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.

Key responsibilities

• 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.

Output

• Highly available, scalable, and secure system architectures that meet business needs.
• Successful integration and scaling of emerging technologies (0-to-1) into production ecosystems.
• Group-wide technical standards, architecture documentation, and best practices.
• Delivery of mission-critical, cross-functional technical projects.
• A measurable increase in the technical capability and output quality of mentored senior engineers.
• Strategic technical roadmaps aligned with executive and business goals.

Minimum Required Qualification

• 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).

Minimum Required Experience

• 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.

Minimum Required Competencies

• Expert-level understanding of advanced data structures, algorithms, and complex system design.
• Subject Matter Expert on multiple databases, caching, load balancers, message queues, distributed key stores, and high-throughput transaction processing.
• Deep understanding of coding best practices, system scalability, security, and performance tuning.
• Demonstrated ability to create a supportive work environment for career and personal development.

Skills, knowledge & Abilities

• You are a leader, a builder, and an operator who strives for simplicity and demonstrates significant creativity.
• Excellent interpersonal, verbal, and written communication skills, including the ability to communicate complex technical problems in a simple way to C-suite executives.
• Ability to build credibility with senior engineers and senior management; able to earn and sustain the respect of highly technical professionals.
• Ability to navigate extreme ambiguity, drive technical alignment across conflicting requirements, and lead teams through complex organisational transformations.
• Strong negotiation, conflict resolution, and technical project management skills.
• Able to plan ahead, proactively identify technology trends, estimate workload, and prioritise effectively across multiple simultaneous initiatives.

Let's talk about life @ Takealot Group

• The power is in your hands: We offer a market-related, Total Remuneration Package that allows full flexibility according to your needs. Go on, be the master of your own destiny.
• No doors: We aren't fans of stuffy offices or siloed work environments. See someone you like? High five, collab and make something great.
• Remote working: Love water cooler chats and working from home? Takealot.com offers a hybrid working model for the best of both worlds.
• Mentorship programme: We aren't kidding when we say the people with the best people win. Now's your chance to be one of the best by learning from the best.
• Naspers Tech Community & Online Learning: Share ideas and grow with global industry leaders who are all just a Slack message away. Love to learn? Upskill with free access to courses on MyAcademy, Udacity, Coursera, and more.
• Good times: Get to know the other extraordinary minds at takealot.com during regular social events and out-of-office activities (think hikes, think mini golf, think good times)
• Staff discount: Millions of products across 28 departments. What more could you ask for?
• Birthday leave: Cake Day all the way. Enjoy your day off - you deserve it.
• Right tools, right job: Mac or Linux, two monitors or one. Whatever your preference, you'll work on the latest tech, of the latest tech.
• Help when you need it most: Confidential counselling, legal support, and financial guidance, for free, anytime, anywhere.
• Tech stack (for days): ReactJS, Python, Scala, Kotlin, Swift, Google Cloud, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes and all things machine learning. If you build it, they will come.
• Free parking: No more 5km fun runs to your desk (unless you want to).

Like what you see? If you meet the above you are an Extraordinary Mind. Apply today!!

Takealot is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Applicants from previously disadvantaged groups and people with disabilities will be given preference