Senior Technical Lead — Django, React, SaaS & DevOps

Senior Technical Lead — Django, React, SaaS & DevOps We are looking for a highly experienced, hands-on Technical Lead with a minimum of 10 years of professional software development experience to take technical ownership of an established production SaaS platform and lead an existing development team. This role reports directly to the CTO. This is not a project management position and it is not a role for someone who has recently progressed into technical leadership. We need someone who has already spent significant time leading developers and taking responsibility for complex production systems. The successful candidate will be expected to remain hands-on with the codebase while taking responsibility for architecture, code quality, CI/CD, deployments, production stability, technical standards, code reviews and engineering execution. You must be comfortable inheriting an existing system, identifying what is wrong without being told where to look, challenging poor architectural decisions, simplifying over-engineered solutions and proactively escalating risks. We are specifically looking for someone who understands that Technical Lead responsibility extends beyond the code they personally write. Minimum Requirements * 10+ years professional software development experience * Significant previous experience as a Technical Lead, Lead Engineer or equivalent * Strong Python/Django experience * Strong React/TypeScript experience * PostgreSQL * Redis and Celery * Docker * GitHub and GitHub Actions * CI/CD design and ownership * Linux production environments * AWS/cloud infrastructure * REST APIs and webhooks * Multi-tenant SaaS architecture * Database transactions, locking and concurrency * Production incident investigation * Automated testing and regression testing * Payment/inventory/transactional systems experience strongly preferred What You Will Own You will take hands-on technical leadership responsibility for: * Overall code quality and architecture * Technical oversight of the development team * Pull-request and architecture reviews * CI/CD and GitHub workflows * Automated deployment processes * Production release controls * Database migration strategy * Multi-tenant data integrity * Automated testing and deployment gates * Production monitoring and technical alerting * Performance and scalability * Security and permissions * Technical debt management * Root-cause analysis of production incidents * Engineering standards and documentation * Mentoring and developing less experienced engineers Our Expectations We expect our Technical Lead to be proactive. If you discover a serious issue affecting stock, payments, data integrity, security, deployments or another part of the platform, we expect you to raise it immediately — even if you did not write that code and it is outside the feature you are currently working on. We do not expect you to personally know or fix everything. We do expect you to recognise when something requires attention or more specialised expertise and communicate that clearly to the CTO. We expect you to investigate root causes rather than continually adding workarounds. We expect you to reduce unnecessary complexity rather than adding layers of code around existing problems. We expect CI/CD and normal production deployments to be automated and reproducible, not dependent on developers manually SSHing into servers and remembering deployment commands. We expect automated tests to actually form part of the release gate. Most importantly, we expect ownership. The Technical Lead is responsible for understanding the health of the platform, not simply completing assigned development tickets. Current Platform The platform is an established multi-tenant SaaS application supporting business-critical functionality including: * Point of Sale * Inventory * Stock movements and transfers * Customer/member management * Payments * Invoicing * Refunds * Reporting * eCommerce * Order fulfilment * Third-party integrations The platform is already in production. You will therefore be working on a live system where data integrity, backwards compatibility and deployment safety matter. Initial Priorities Your first priorities will include: 1. Understanding the existing architecture and codebase. 2. Reviewing current technical risks and technical debt. 3. Reviewing and strengthening CI/CD and deployment processes. 4. Ensuring automated regression tests form mandatory release gates. 5. Reviewing inventory, payments and transactional integrity. 6. Reviewing eCommerce and its interaction with the core POS. 7. Reviewing multi-tenant database architecture and migrations. 8. Identifying unnecessary legacy/workaround code. 9. Establishing appropriate engineering and code-review standards. 10. Producing and maintaining a prioritised technical risk register. We are not looking for an unnecessary rewrite. We need someone experienced enough to know the difference between code that should be refactored, code that should be replaced and code that should simply be left alone. Working With the Team You will work with and provide technical leadership to an existing development and QA team. You will report directly to the CTO. You should be comfortable: * assigning and reviewing technical work, * mentoring developers, * conducting code reviews, * challenging implementation approaches, * explaining architectural decisions, * holding developers accountable for quality, * collaborating with QA, * investigating production incidents, * and communicating technical risks clearly to non-developers where required. Availability This is intended to be a full-time, long-term role. This is not suitable for someone balancing several other full-time clients or employment commitments. We expect transparency regarding any other ongoing professional engagements. You must have meaningful availability overlapping South African business hours. Application Requirements Please begin your application with: “I have read the Technical Lead brief.” Then answer: 1. How many years have you worked professionally as a software developer? 2. How many years have you worked specifically as a Technical Lead/Lead Engineer? 3. What is the largest production SaaS platform you have technically led? 4. How many developers/QA engineers were you responsible for? 5. Describe a legacy production system you inherited that had significant architectural problems. What did you change, and what did you deliberately leave alone? 6. Describe a CI/CD pipeline you personally designed or substantially improved. 7. Have you worked with database-per-tenant or other multi-tenant architectures? Explain the model and the major risks. 8. Describe a production incident involving a race condition, duplicate transaction, payment issue, inventory problem or data-integrity failure that you personally investigated. 9. How do you approach a developer who repeatedly fixes symptoms rather than identifying the underlying architectural problem? 10. What other ongoing employment, clients or substantial professional commitments do you currently have? Generic or AI-generated answers will not be sufficient. Shortlisted candidates should expect a detailed technical interview and practical code/architecture review. We are looking for someone who has already done this job successfully in production, not someone looking for their first opportunity to grow into a Technical Lead position.