Head of Commercial Payments Engineering

About the role

Absa is looking for a Head of Commercial Payments Engineering in Randburg to lead the end-to-end engineering strategy, architecture, design, development, delivery, reliability and continuous improvement of its commercial payments technology products and platforms. The role covers the full payments value chain, from merchant acquiring and POS to e-commerce gateways, QR payments, digital wallets, switching, settlement and reconciliation, and works closely with the CIO, business product owners, enterprise architecture, infrastructure, cybersecurity and risk.

Key responsibilities

• Define and execute the engineering strategy, set the technology roadmap and act as principal technology partner to business stakeholders and product owners.
• Lead design and implementation of payment solutions across front-end channels, gateways, switching, APIs, data services and back-end processing, with secure, scalable and resilient architectures.
• Drive engineering excellence through modern software engineering practices, automation, DevSecOps, cloud and platform modernisation, and the responsible adoption of AI-enabled engineering capabilities.
• Lead multidisciplinary engineering and business analysis teams, manage strategic technology vendors and ensure technology stays fit for purpose and cost-effective.
• Establish engineering standards, reusable components, reference architectures and technical documentation, and maintain a managed engineering improvement roadmap for technical debt.
• Implement CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, infrastructure as code, secure coding and security-by-design, and introduce engineering metrics such as deployment frequency, change failure rate and recovery time.