Lead Product Engineer - Front Arena

at  Absa Bank Limited

Empowering Africa’s tomorrow, together…one story at a time.
With over 100 years of rich history and strongly positioned as a local bank with regional and international expertise, a career with our family offers the opportunity to be part of this exciting growth journey, to reset our future and shape our destiny as a proudly African group.
Job Summary
Build high-performing, scalable, enterprise-grade applications & build capability in others to do the same. This includes but is not limited to applying critical thinking, design thinking and problem solving skills in an agile team environment to solve complex technical problems (Front End, Back End and Integration) with high quality solutions & leading all phases of the development lifecycle to deliver.
Job Description
Absa’s CIB Technology team provides technology support to the organization’s Corporate and Investment Banking business. This technology team is specifically dedicated to our Markets business area and is responsible for the building, support, enhancement and maintenance of all trade and post trade activities for vendor-based and bespoke application suites that fall within the Markets business area.
We are looking for a Lead Product Engineer/Developer with experience in Financial Markets (trading) and with a balance of quantitative knowledge vs technical knowledge to join the Front Arena team.

Key critical requirements:

• Min 10 years of experience in Banking / Investment Banking / Capital Markets IT domain
• 8-10 years of experience in Front Arena (or equivalent system) development / consulting projects (Preferable)
• Strong technical skills: Software design and development, Business analysis, quality assurance, release management
• Excellent interpersonal, communication and stakeholder’s management skills
• Ability to perform in a challenging and dynamic environment.
• Experience in Front Arena AEF: ACM, AEL, ADFL, ASQL, Python, C# .net, C++, MS SQL, XSLT (Preferable)
• Deep knowledge of FA components such as PRIME, ADS, AMB, AMBA, ATS, AMWI, PACE, APS, AFG-AMB, SWIFT adapters, Adaptiv Docs etc. (Preferable)
• Functional skills required: In depth understanding of asset classes such as Equities, Fixed Income, Credit, FX, their valuation models and product lifecycle, Financial Risk Management, Regulatory and Risk reporting, Trading and Position Management. (Preferable)

Key accountabilities:

DevOps

• Apply critical thinking, design thinking and problem solving skills in an agile team environment to solve complex technical problems (Front End, Back End and Integration) with high quality solutions
• Contribute to and in some cases lead all phases of the development lifecycle including e.g. design process
• Determine operational feasibility of solutions by evaluating analysis, problem definition, business requirements, solution development and proposed solutions
• Develop high quality software / application design and architecture in a test driven & domain driven / cross domain environment
• Quickly produce well-organised, optimized, and documented source code to deliver technical solutions
• Ensure designs & solutions support the technical organisation principles of self-service, repeatability, testability, scalability & resilience
• Apply general design patterns and paradigms to deliver technical solutions
• Debug existing source code and polish feature sets.
• Apply version control and related concepts and techniques
• Align all application development & development process to Group Architecture, Security & Infrastructure guidelines
• Work with project & program teams (when required) to plan & manage the development lifecycle e.g. releases, risk management, testing, integration etc.
• Conduct reviews, performance monitoring & ongoing optimization and maintenance on applications
• Stay ahead of the curve on emerging technologies and development practices e.g. scripting languages, containerization etc.

• Contribute to the design & evolution of Group Architecture, Infrastructure & associated technical standards for the organization

  (Preferable)

• Create & Maintain Sophisticated CI / CD Pipelines (authoring & supporting CI/CD pipelines in Jenkins / Azure Devops or similar tools and deploy to multi-site environments – supporting and managing your applications all the way to production)

• Use & configure modern observability techniques to provide a deeper understanding of the application. To do this, leverage e.g. aggregated logging via ELK stack, metrics via Prometheus / Grafana / NewRelic and distributed tracing like Zipkin/Jaeger etc.
• Automate tasks through appropriate tools and scripting e.g. Docker, Ansible, Kubernetes
• Work with guilds and other technical SME’s to improve and evolve technical products and services
• Apply unit testing frameworks and perform integration, validation and verification testing (apply knowledge of stubbing tools e.g. wiremock, hoverfly etc.)

People

• Coach & mentor other engineers
• Conduct peer reviews, testing, problem solving within and across the broader team
• Provide technical subject matter expertise and support in the attraction and recruitment of Product Engineers for the organization
• Participate as a subject matter expert in the development & development planning of the broader product engineering team
• Support the people change teams in the design of adoption processes (Customer, Employee & 3rd Party Adoption)

Risk and Governance

• Identify technical risks and mitigate these (pre, during & post deployment)
• Update / Design all application documentation aligned to the organization technical standards and risk / governance frameworks
• Create business cases & solution specifications for various governance processes
• Participate in incident management & DR activity – applying critical thinking, problem solving & technical expertise to get to the bottom of major incidents
• Deliver on time & on budget (always)

Education
Bachelor’s Degree: Information Technology
Absa Bank Limited is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer. In compliance with the Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998, preference will be given to suitable candidates from designated groups whose appointments will contribute towards achievement of equitable demographic representation of our workforce profile and add to the diversity of the Bank.
Absa Bank Limited reserves the right not to make an appointment to the post as advertise

Please refer the Job description for details