WFS Senior Manager Development and DevOps

Woolworths Financial Services | Full time

Cape Town, South Africa | Posted on 08/07/2025

Woolworths Financial Services, or WFS as it is better known, is a Joint Venture with Absa Bank, that supports the Woolworths retail business by providing in-store credit in the form of the Woolworths Store Card and offering value-added services including credit cards, personal loans and short-term insurance as well as life insurance linked to other products.

Woolworths Financial Services follows a Work-in-Hybrid work structure which requires employees to work from home for the majority of their time with some rotation into office.

The purpose of this role is to lead the Developers and Dev Ops professionals and provide leadership to the WFS Digital Factory. This includes embedment of standards, quality and best practices, security, reporting, configuration and build, testing, planning, and deployment of solutions. The incumbent will be accountable for all aspects of deployment and technical operations including technical project resources (partners/subcontractors or staff), scheduling, risk management, internal and external communication to stakeholders, status reporting, and resource management.

The individual will also be required to set direction for the area and be responsible for driving operational excellence.

• Strategy and Leadership
• Define and execute the Development and Dev Ops vision and strategy aligned to broader IT and business goals.
• Develop long-term roadmaps for team capacity, systems scalability, and platform reliability.
• Lead cross-functional teams with a focus on engineering culture, Dev Ops adoption, and agile maturity.
• Serve as a key decision-maker for application architecture, tooling, and development standards.
• Lead hiring, mentoring, and performance management across development and Dev Ops roles.
• Act as a liaison between software engineering, QA, operations, infrastructure, and cybersecurity teams.
• Collaborate and support the development of the digital strategy and plan.

• Manage full software development lifecycle (SDLC) including design, development, code review, testing, release, and maintenance.
• Oversee engineering quality assurance, ensuring coding standards, test coverage, and secure coding practices.
• Coordinate with product management and stakeholders to ensure timely, on-scope delivery.
• Facilitate agile ceremonies and champion lean/agile practices (e.g., Scrum, SAFe, or Kanban).
• Be involved in the lower-level solution design in collaboration with the Solution Architect.

• Oversee CI/CD pipeline development and maintenance using tools such as Jenkins, Bitbucket, Git Hub, Sonarqube, Tenable.io, Terraform, QA test framework, etc.
• Implement and maintain containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, ECS/EKS).
• Lead efforts for observability — monitoring, logging, alerting, and APM (e.g., Grafana, ELK, Data Dog, etc.).
• Collaborate with Information Security to embed Dev Sec Ops  practices.
• Manage public/hybrid cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) for application hosting, deployment, and scaling.
• Be involved in the lower-level solution design in collaboration with the Solution Architect.

• Establish change management controls and deployment governance in line with ITIL or equivalent frameworks.
• Present progress reports, risk assessments, and incident post-mortems to senior stakeholders.
• Ensure appropriate documentation for software, environments, and infrastructure.
• Maintain audit-readiness and support internal and external compliance assessments.
• Manage costs according to budget, as it relates to technology, people and process.

• Deployment frequency:
  Time-to-market for new releases
• Change failure rate: % of changes that result in service incidents
• Mean time to recovery (MTTR):
  Average time to recover from incidents
• Uptime / SLA adherence:
  Application availability and performance
• Automation coverage: % of infrastructure managed as code
• Team engagement:
  Retention, satisfaction, and professional growth of…