Group Chief Technology Officer

Takealot Group seeks a seasoned Group CTO to join the Group Executive leadership team in Cape Town.  As South Africa’s largest ecommerce Group, we are a dynamic, hyper-growth organization seeking smart, creative, hard-working people with integrity to join us. The Group transacts through two customer-facing brands, takealot.com and Mr D. 

Takealot.com is South Africa’s largest e-commerce platform serving more than 5 million South Africans and enabling more than 12,000 third-party businesses to transact on its platform. The business has built its fulfillment network including last-mile delivery capability. The business is building an ecosystem with new revenue streams to support the core business over the next 5 years. Tech will be at the heart of driving future growth and profitability, improving customers' lives every day.  

Mr D is South Africa’s favourite on-demand delivery platform, offering customers the widest range of restaurants, grocery as well as on-demand retail services. Mr D’s transition from a food delivery business to an on-demand platform is underway, however, tech will lead the way to scale! 

The vision and strategy for the Group is the linking of takealot.com’s platform with Mr D’s hyper-local on-demand platform to empower customers with ultimate choice and convenience, a significant tech challenge with massive rewards.  

Market potential 

Ecommerce is still nascent in South Africa with 5% penetration, at the same time the on-demand market is experiencing explosive growth with groceries leading the way. We believe that over the next 5 years, ecommerce will more than double to an estimated USD 8 billion market, and Takealot Group is strongly positioned to lead the growth.   

Reporting to the Group CEO

This role, reporting to Takealot Group CEO, will lead the tech strategy within the Group, leading the engineering teams responsible for the application development of Takealot.com and its supporting operational verticals across all platforms. The role will oversee and support the Mr D CTO, as the merging of takealot.com and Mr D technologies will be key to unlocking Group potential. 

You will be a key member of the Takealot Group Executive, working closely with the Group CEO and the functional Group Executives to define and deliver a comprehensive technical strategy aligned with Takealot.com’s and Mr D’s business goals.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Establish the company’s technical vision and lead all aspects of the technological development.
• Play a crucial role in driving technological innovation, shaping the digital roadmap, and ensuring the successful implementation of technology initiatives.
• Collaborating closely with product and business leadership to ensure the company's technology requirements are aligned with the company’s vision, strategy, and roadmap
• Help steer the organization toward greater efficiencies and better performance by adopting the right technology investments
• Identify technology trends to continuously scale up the products with a strong focus on AI capabilities to drive customer experience and resource efficiency
• Develop IT architecture strategies, partnering with the security team to implement changes to existing technology keeping up to date with current and future levels of IT security, threats, vulnerabilities 
• Demonstrate strong leadership traits to gain the trust & confidence of existing technology and product leaders, and build a culture of growth, learning, and innovation
• Build a vibrant engineering culture focused on ownership, accountability, teamwork, and curiosity
• Maintain rigorous performance management practices to uphold high standards of performance and accountability whilst maintaining, growing, and evolving our group's technical talent and organizational structure.
• Ensure the technical budget is properly forecasted, monitored, and optimized.

To achieve this, we're looking for someone who:

• Is an expert at engineering processes such as change management, incident response, and quality assurance
• Has a deep understanding of the software development lifecycle, and different approaches to agile development
• Has a deep understanding of modern distributed computing systems at scale
• Has a strong understanding of DevOps practices such as Infrastructure as Code, Automation, and Continuous Delivery
• Has familiarity with modern data architectures, and AI capabilities
• Has familiarity with cloud infrastructure and container-based environments
• Has familiarity with security frameworks such as NIST, ISO-27001
• Has the ability to innovate, showing technical vision and thought leadership
• Is a strong decision-maker with the ability to effect change through influence
• Is self-managing with strong organizational and time management skills
• Has high attention to detail, strong mathematical and financial skills

Qualifications & Experience:

• Should bring 20+ years of experience with the last 5-8 years in leadership roles in eCommerce or relevant industry will be beneficial 
• The leader should be willing to get his hands dirty whenever needed and should have a strong desire to work with engineers at all levels. 
• Proven track record of crafting and rolling out several technologies and products to fast-paced dynamic businesses. 
• Experience in working on complex systems, and the adoption of new and state-of-the-art technologies is helpful. 
• Expertise in large-scale application development, data engineering, mobile app development, and SAAS technologies.
• Hands-on experience in architecting distributed and big-data systems using the newest technologies.
• Should have a sound understanding of analytics systems. Should have built platforms/systems/applications supporting large numbers of users and transactions
• Should have been an integral part of the product management lifecycle from conception to delivery. 
• A track record of owning products from start to finish would be an added advantage.
• Strong track record of leading managers and high-performing engineering teams. Should have demonstrated outstanding people leadership skills.

Why Join Us? 

• Growth: We believe that over the next 5 years, ecommerce will more than double to an estimated USD 8 billion market, and Takealot Group is strongly positioned to lead the growth.
• Impact: Contribute to a leading company that’s shaping the future of e-commerce and on-demand services in South Africa.
• Challenge: Tackle unique technological challenges that influence the lives of millions and lead high-stakes projects.
• Culture: Thrive in an environment that fosters innovation, collaboration, and professional growth.