Platform Domain Lead

This is a leadership role reporting to the Chief Information Officer: Digital & AI. The Platform Domain Lead provides engineering leadership for the platforms that support Digital Business Bank, covering strategy, delivery, platform health and service outcomes.

Education
Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology

What the role owns

• Platform vision, roadmap, lifecycle, investment plan and service outcomes, with the CIO and Architecture Lead
• Implementation results, platform health, code quality and technical standards across delivery teams
• Translation of architecture into secure, maintainable, resilient and reusable software
• Conversion of business demand and architecture direction into engineering priorities, capacity plans and release outcomes
• Platform boundaries, products, services, APIs and ownership, to cut duplication and unmanaged dependencies
• Balance of new features with resilience, security, modernisation, technical debt and cost

Engineering standards and delivery

• Set standards for coding, branching, review, integration, documentation, dependencies, observability and deployment
• Build those standards into tooling, templates, pipelines, quality gates and automated controls
• Oversee design and implementation of high-risk or strategic changes
• Drive reuse of components, APIs and patterns; stop unnecessary customisation
• Own availability, performance, capacity, recovery, supportability and security outcomes
• Set service objectives, telemetry, production-readiness criteria and improvement routines
• Make vulnerabilities, obsolescence, technical debt and end-of-life risks visible and get them fixed
• Work with Operations, QA and Cyber Security on incidents, problems and preventative work
• Use version control
• Align development to Group Architecture, Security and Infrastructure guidelines
• Work with project and programme teams on releases, risk, testing and integration
• Review, monitor and maintain applications
• Keep up with emerging practices (for example scripting languages and containerisation)
• Contribute to Group Architecture, Infrastructure and technical standards

People

• Lead engineering managers, technical leads, specialists and partners, including workforce, budget and supplier performance
• Coach and mentor engineers
• Run peer reviews, testing and problem-solving across teams
• Support recruitment of Product Engineers
• Help plan development of the wider product engineering team
• Support adoption work with customer, employee and third-party change teams

Risk and governance

• Identify and mitigate technical risk before, during and after deployment
• Keep application documentation in line with technical standards and governance
• Prepare business cases and solution specifications for governance (including CTO approvals)
• Take part in incident management and disaster recovery
• Deliver on time and on budget

Success measures
Predictable delivery, lead time, deployment frequency, reliability, quality-gate coverage, risk reduction and reuse.

Technical depth expected
Software, APIs, event-driven systems, cloud, CI/CD and observability, including GraphQL, Spring Boot, Node.js and AWS microservices.

First-year priorities

• Confirm platform gaps and risks
• Publish the roadmap
• Put standards in place
• Deliver visible outcomes
• Strengthen leadership capability

Absa is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer. Preference will be given to suitable candidates from designated groups under the Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998. Absa may choose not to fill the advertised post.