Senior Python Engineer
Sanlam Rewards|Posted 1 day ago
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Skills and experience
Location and salary
Role description
Company Overview
Sanlam FinTech stands at the forefront of financial technology innovation, transforming how
millions of people across emerging and established markets access and interact with financial
services. As a leading digital financial services provider, we harness cutting-edge technology to
create scalable, distributed systems that power the financial future for underserved
communities. Our mission is to democratise financial access through technology excellence,
and our success is built on the foundation of a diverse, high-performing team that thrives in our
culture of continuous learning, adaptability, and constructive collaboration.
In an industry experiencing unprecedented growth, we offer an environment where your
technical expertise directly impacts the lives of millions while working with modern technologies
that keep us at the cutting edge of FinTech innovation.
Position Overview
Job Title: Senior Python Engineer
Reports To: Technical Lead
Location: Hybrid/Office-based (flexible arrangement)
Team Size: 3-person engineering team
The Senior Python Engineer position represents a critical role within our high-performance
engineering culture. You will be responsible for strategic technical delivery, collaborative
architecture decisions, and the development of scalable backend and frontend systems that
handle complex business requirements. This role demands both exceptional technical skills and
strong collaborative abilities, as you'll contribute to technical decisions while fostering a culture
of continuous learning and technical excellence within our focused team.
Key Responsibilities
Strategic Technical Delivery
- Backend Architecture: Contribute to and shape the team's technical direction, ensuring alignment with Django 5.x best practices and modern architectural patterns
- System Design: Design and implement scalable, maintainable backend systems using
Django REST Framework capable of handling growing transaction volumes with exceptional reliability
- Technology Integration: Drive effective integration and utilization of our complete tech stack including Celery asynchronous workflows, AWS services, Redis caching, and PostgreSQL databases
Asynchronous Processing & Task Management
- Celery Implementation: Design, develop, and maintain Celery-based asynchronous workflows leveraging SQS and Redis for task queuing and distribution
- Task Optimization: Ensure optimal performance and reliability of background job processing, monitoring, and error handling within task queue systems
- Workflow Architecture: Implement sophisticated asynchronous patterns including scheduled tasks with django-celery-beat and result management with django-celery-results
Collaborative Team Development
- Technical Collaboration: Work effectively within the engineering team, contributing to architectural decisions and technical discussions on equal footing
- Code Excellence: Deliver production-ready code that upholds high standards for quality, maintainability, and test coverage
- Knowledge Sharing: Facilitate continuous learning within the team through code reviews, technical documentation, and collaborative problem-solving
*Infrastructure & DevOps Excellence
- AWS Management: Manage and optimise AWS infrastructure components including Secrets Manager, ALB with custom authentication, SQS, and S3 storage integration
- Database Stewardship: Optimize PostgreSQL database design and queries for performance, ensuring efficient operations on t3.micro instances
- Deployment & Monitoring: Maintain robust deployment pipelines and leverage Sentry for comprehensive error tracking and application monitoring
Core Technical Skills
- Advanced Python proficiency with deep understanding of modern Python features and best practices
- Extensive hands-on experience with Django 5.x framework, ORM patterns, and model design
- Strong understanding of Django middleware, signals, class-based views, and advanced framework features
- Demonstrated expertise with Django REST Framework 3.x for building scalable APIs
- Deep expertise with Celery task queue architecture, worker configuration, and optimisation
- Hands-on experience with both SQS and Redis as Celery brokers and caching layers
- Proficiency with Celery beat for scheduled task management and Celery results backend configuration
- Understanding of distributed task processing patterns, error handling, and retry mechanisms
- Proficient experience with AWS services including Secrets Manager, SQS, S3, ALB, and EC2
- Strong understanding of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and security best practices
- Experience with environment configuration management and secure credential handling
- Knowledge of containerization and deployment best practices
- Advanced PostgreSQL expertise including query optimisation, indexing, and schema design
- Proficiency with psycopg2 for database connectivity and advanced query patterns
- Experience optimising database performance for high-concurrency scenarios
- Strong understanding of transactions, connection pooling, and database maintenance
- Expert-level proficiency in RESTful API design and implementation using Django REST Framework
- Hands-on experience with JWT-based authentication and PyJWT implementation
- Understanding of OAuth integration patterns and secure token management
- Expertise in API versioning, pagination, serialization, and throttling strategies
- Demonstrated commitment to test-driven development and high code coverage standards
- Familiarity with code quality tools and continuous integration practices
- Advanced Git workflows and collaborative development practices
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines and automated deployment strategies
- Proficiency with containerization and deployment orchestration
- Strong understanding of performance profiling and optimisation techniques
Role Requirements
- Minimum 6+ years of professional software development experience with Python
- Minimum 5+ years of hands-on experience with Django framework (specifically Django 4.x
or 5.x)
- Proven expertise with Celery for asynchronous task processing and job queuing
- Solid hands-on experience with PostgreSQL database design and optimisation
- Demonstrated experience with AWS services and cloud infrastructure management
- Strong proficiency with Django REST Framework for API development
- Proven expertise with pytest and test-driven development methodologies
- Advanced Git proficiency and experience with collaborative development workflows
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent professional
experience
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About Sanlam Rewards
Sanlam Rewards (part of Sanlam FinTech) is working on the future of loyalty & rewards within Sanlam Group. The
Sanlam Fintech cluster is a host of existing product houses that Sanlam – Africa's largest non-banking financial services group – believes will be key for its digital, direct growth ambitions. These include: Sanlam Rewards (Wealth Bonus, Sanlam Reality), SatrixNow, MiWay Blink, Santam Switch, Home+, EasyEquities, Sanlam Credit Solutions and Sanlam Multi Data.
Sanlam FinTech stands at the forefront of financial technology innovation, transforming how millions of people across emerging and established markets access and interact with financial services. As a leading digital financial services provider, we harness cutting-edge technology to create scalable, distributed systems that power the financial future for underserved communities. Our mission is to democratise financial access through technology excellence, and our success is built on the foundation of a diverse, high-performing team that thrives in our culture of continuous learning, adaptability, and constructive collaboration.
In an industry experiencing unprecedented growth, we offer an environment where your technical expertise directly impacts the lives of millions while working with modern technologies that keep us at the cutting edge of FinTech innovation.
Qualities We Value
Irrespective of role and level, we value the following qualities in Software Development:
We Value Fungibility We prioritise hiring engineers who are versatile generalists rather than specialists. Our ideal engineers can solve problems at scale using first principles and can tackle issues across diverse domains. They can move seamlessly between teams with minimal ramp-up time, meeting the changing business requirements of SFT and the clusters we support.
We Value Strong Ownership We believe in taking full responsibility for our work. Engineers at our company understand that the buck stops with them, never saying "that's not my job". We are a DevOps environment, and our engineers deploy and operate the products they own in production. They care deeply about the customer experience and are committed to ensuring that their contributions meet the highest standards of quality and reliability.
We Value Teamwork and Collaboration We emphasise the importance of teamwork and collaboration in everything we do. Our engineers work together to achieve common goals, share knowledge, and support one another. We believe that a collaborative environment creates a sense of belonging, fosters innovation, improves problem-solving, and enhances the overall success of our projects.
We Value Leaders Leadership potential and ability are crucial to our success. We look for engineers with strong soft skills, excellent communication abilities, and a team-player mentality. Good culture fit, a collaborative and mentoring spirit, knowing when to ask for help, and demonstrating humility are all key traits we value in our leaders. These qualities enable our engineers to inspire and guide their peers, contributing to a positive and productive work environment.
We Value Automation We focus on automating away manual processes. Our engineers automate all aspects of the software development and operations lifecycle. This includes automated testing at all levels (unit tests, integration tests and testing the customer experience in production), automated deployments, and automated monitoring and alarming in production.
Tech Stack
application and data
dev ops
