Software Engineering Team Lead (Discovery Machine Learning)

takealot.com, a leading South African online retailer, is looking for a highly talented Engineering Team Lead (Discovery Machine Learning) to join our team in Cape Town.

We are a young, dynamic, hyper growth company looking for smart, creative, hard-working people with integrity to join us. We offer a market related, Total Remuneration Package which allows full flexibility according to your needs, a great work environment and a promise that you won’t be bored as long as you are prepared for a challenge and want to build something great.

You will lead a team of Machine Learning Software Engineers constantly striving for quality solutions that are delivered on time, within budget and scope, and drive a culture of quality and personal accountability.

You will need a strong and pragmatic understanding of Machine Learning development and have direct experience building high performance, scalable backend and RESTful web applications. You will be from a development background and have a good understanding of architectural practices with a specialization in Machine Learning. You will be an advocate of agile and iterative engineering practices and you will have prior line management experience with a track record of keeping highly skilled developers motivated.

This is an exciting opportunity to lead a growing team of engineers working on takealot.com's ambitious development roadmap of one of Takealot Group’s key AI focus areas: Search & Recommendations.

This is a hands-on role and you should expect that at least 30% of your time will be spent writing code and building machine learning models, as well as working with others on your team directly contributing to the production of code and models. The remainder of your time will be split between architectural and strategic planning with peers and senior developers, and the day-to-day people management and development required of a high-performing and successful team. 

This position reports to the Engineering Director for Machine Learning.

Attributes required:

• Customer centric.
• Solutions and results-oriented.
• Natural leader.
• Innovative problem solver.
• Curious thinker that understands technical topics beyond the average reader.
• An ambitious and hard-working individual prepared to do more than the 9 to 5 to get up to speed.
• An influencer that constantly grows the quality of engineering through technical initiatives.
• Effective time management and organizational skills.
• Proven ability to develop and maintain positive working relationships.
• Must be comfortable with rapidly changing and/or loosely defined requirements that are refined over time.
• Skilled at active listening and capable of facilitating discussions.
• Strong communication skills with both internal team members and external business stakeholders.
• Strong initiative to find ways to improve solutions, systems, and processes.

Qualifications and Experience:

• Bachelor's Degree or Advanced Diploma (Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Machine Learning or Engineering) and a minimum of 5 years’ Software Development experience, of which a minimum of 3 years’ developing production-grade Machine Learning solutions is required.
• In the event that a candidate does not have a Bachelor’s Degree or an Advanced Diploma (Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Machine Learning or Engineering), an equivalent experience requirement must be met, which equates to a minimum of 8 years’ of Software Development experience, of which a minimum of 5 years’ developing production-grade Machine Learning solutions is required.
• A minimum of 3 years’ managing and leading a software engineering team, including mentoring and developing technical teams, line management of teams and performance management of teams.
• In the event of no prior management experience, at least 3 years’ delivering significant Machine Learning solutions as a technical lead, is required.
• Providing guidance to fellow engineers, evaluating and comparing model performance and model architecture, performing error analysis, and hyper parameter tuning. 
• Experience leading a team technically, with a focus on high-quality output.
• Experience working within an agile team that is operationally hands-on, and an advocate of that culture.
• Excellent problem-solving skills.
• Experience developing software in Python in a test-driven environment (and/or at least in one of the following languages: Java, C, C++ or C#).
• A thorough understanding of computer science fundamentals, including object-oriented design and data structures and algorithms.
• Experience with MySQL or Postgres, and BigQuery or a similar technology in a high-load environment.
• Significant technical experience and a proven track record of architectural ownership and understanding.
• Experience in developing distributed, high transactional and available systems.
• Experience working with Big Data: data volume, variety and velocity.

Preferred Skills and Experience:

• Experience developing software for a highly-transactional retail online platform.
• A thorough understanding of software engineering practices and best practices, including agile software development, source code control systems and the use of software IDEs and development and testing tools.
• An understanding of software deployment tools, deployment processes and best practices.
• Experience working with NoSQL data stores. 
• Experience working with Kafka.
• Experience working with the AWS and/or GCP platforms, and Docker and/or Kubernetes.
• Experience with building RESTful API web services and microservices.
• Experience with Natural Language Processing (NLP).
• Experience with search systems and technologies such as SOLR or ElasticSearch. 
• Experience building customer recommendation models (e.g. Collaboration vs. Content-based, Item-to-Item vs. User-to-Item).
• Experience with Jupyter notebooks.
• Experience with Scikit-learn, SciPy, Numpy, Pandas and PyTorch.
• Experience with TensorFlow, TensorFlow Extended, TensorFlow Serving.
• Experience with Kubeflow and Dataform.

The Environment:

• takealot.com employees are entrepreneurial and dynamic, smart, customer-centric, fun and have the shared ambition of takealot.com being the leading e-commerce company in Africa.
• We have fun, work hard, take ownership, work in teams to create solutions, and are always open to direct feedback/new ideas on where we can improve.
• We are short on ego and high on output.
• We are doers and not only thinkers, it’s all in the execution after all.
• We love what we do and what we are creating.

We seek to Employ an Extra Ordinary Mind who

• is forthright but respectful
• is an expert at doing, who can not only design but also execute
• is analytical, able to use data to make decisions
• is competitive, self-directed and strive to be the BEST (GREAT requires a lot of work and does not only happen during business hours
• is passionate about the potential of e-commerce and delivering a world-class customer experience
• is entrepreneurial, thrives under change and accepts it is a constant and always looks for solutions to do something better and faster
• is able to think about problems from a business perspective using technical and product input
• is curious and challenge the status quo
• is innovative and enjoys iteration
• is collaborative
• will be at the cutting edge of developing new concepts for takealot.com.
• thinks like an owner of the business.
• is SMART, has INTEGRITY and is HARDWORKING

If you meet the above you are an Extraordinary Mind so come and join us!

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