Tech Lead

About

Clickatell, founded in Cape Town in 2000, was the first company to connect businesses with consumers via SMS using just four lines of code. Today, it powers AI‑driven chat commerce for leading global brands across industries such as banking, retail, telecoms, and healthcare—including Visa, ABSA, MTN, Toyota, and Pick n Pay. Over 25 years, Clickatell has led multiple industry firsts, such as tokenized WhatsApp payments, KYC chat banking, and Chat‑2‑Pay, through its award‑winning AI Chat Commerce Platform that enables brands to interact and transact with customers seamlessly.

The Role

We’re looking for a Tech Lead who thrives at the intersection of product and engineering excellence. You exist to turn ambitious ideas into real, scalable systems that our users rely on every day. This role is your playground to shape architecture, mentor engineers, and deliver high‑quality solutions across our platform—whether it’s core features, integrations, or new innovations. You’ll collaborate across product, design, and operations, influencing both the “what” and the “how” of our tech direction. If you’re energized by complexity, enjoy guiding talented engineers, and want your work to have a tangible impact on our products, this is the role for you.

Responsibilities of the Role

• Contribute to end‑to‑end technical architecture and system design across product and AI‑driven initiatives.
• Work closely with Product and User Experience teams to translate business requirements into scalable, secure, and maintainable solutions that align with overall platform direction.
• Drive requirement clarity and technical discovery by working closely with Product and User Experience teams to refine user stories, identify edge cases, evaluate trade‑offs, and define implementation strategies.
• Lead and facilitate agile ceremonies including backlog grooming, estimation sessions, technical design discussions, stand‑ups.
• Lead development using Java, Spring Boot, and Python, delivering high‑performance, secure, and reliable systems that handle high transaction volumes and real‑time workflows.
• Drive AI‑integrated development by guiding the integration of large language models, retrieval‑augmented generation architectures, and vector search systems into production applications.
• Own engineering standards and code quality across services, ensuring clean architecture, strong testing practices, clear documentation, and consistent design patterns.
• Mentor and guide engineers through requirement analysis, design discussions, code reviews, debugging, and production readiness.
• Collaborate with cross‑functional teams including Infrastructure, Database, DevOps, and Customer Support teams to resolve complex technical issues and ensure smooth releases.
• Ensure production stability and operational excellence by leading root‑cause analysis and driving improvements in monitoring and observability.

Requirements of the Role

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including experience in a technical leadership role.

Work Experience

Essential

• Strong hands‑on experience with Java and Spring Boot in building microservices.
• Strong hands‑on experience with Python backend development.
• Demonstrated experience working closely with Product Managers and Design teams to shape, refine, and drive technical requirements.
• Experience translating business requirements into technical design documents, implementation plans, and delivery estimates.
• Experience designing and building high‑volume, low‑latency distributed systems.
• Experience integrating AI capabilities into production systems.
• Experience with RESTful API design and integration.
• Experience deploying applications in cloud environments such as Amazon Web Services.
• Experience leading technical discussions, mentoring engineering teams, and facilitating agile ceremonies.
• Experience working with event‑driven systems and message brokers such as Kafka or similar platforms.

Preferred

• Experience with Kotlin or modern JVM‑based technologies.
• Experience integrating with enterprise third‑party systems or large‑scale platforms.