Director of Engineering - South Africa (Cape Town preferred)

About Old.St Labs

We’re a London-HQ software development agency delivering modern web and AI products for international clients - from VC-backed startups to established enterprises. Our delivery team is primarily Philippines-based, with one team member in South Africa so far; we’re now hiring an SA-based engineering leader to drive execution, standards and team growth alongside our fractional CTO.

Role Summary

Own engineering delivery across multiple client projects. Define the “golden path” (standards, templates, CI/CD, IaC, quality gates, security). Be hands-on when it matters - reading/writing code, reviewing architectures, unblocking risk. Operationalise AI in real products. Grow and mentor a distributed team (PH + a small SA nucleus).

You will

• Own delivery & engineering management: Plan, staff and ship reliably across parallel client engagements; surface and manage technical risk.

• Be hands-on when needed: Dive into code/architecture, run design reviews, pair on hard problems.

• Stand up the golden path: Establish secure SDLC, repo templates/monorepo strategy, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, observability, QA/UAT and release practices.

• Operationalise AI: Introduce standard patterns for RAG/agents, prompt/guardrail/eval workflows, data/privacy reviews and cost monitoring.

• Lead people & culture: Coach tech leads and ICs in the Philippines; hire and grow 2–4 SA engineers over time; set clear expectations, feedback and progression.

• Face clients when required: Support discovery, solutioning and estimates; handle tough trade-offs and communicate with non-technical stakeholders.

• Partner with the fractional CTO: Align on tech strategy and radar; you own day-to-day execution.

First 3-6 months

• Engineering playbook and reusable templates live; projects migrated onto the golden path.

• Project health dashboard running (lead time, deploy frequency, change fail %, MTTR, plus margin signals).

• Security/privacy baseline in place (secrets, PII handling, GDPR/POPIA, AI usage policy).

• Two flagship client projects measurably faster and more reliable (e.g. 25%+ PR cycle-time reduction; doubled deploy frequency).

Skills & experience

• 12-18 years in software engineering with 5+ years leading multi-squad delivery (agency/consulting strongly preferred).

• Proven track record building engineering standards/platforms (pipelines, monorepos, IaC, SRE/observability).

• Deep expertise in at least one modern stack (e.g. TypeScript/Node, React/Next.js, NestJS) and strong cloud fundamentals (AWS preferred).

• Comfortable shipping LLM/AI features in production (OpenAI/Azure OpenAI, vector stores, retrieval patterns, evals/guardrails).

• Excellent stakeholder management; confident with clients and execs.

• Experienced leading distributed teams across time zones (UK + PH) and able to jump into code when stakes are high.

Location & ways of working

• Remote in South Africa; Cape Town preferred for talent network and meetups.

• Core collaboration 9:00–18:00 SAST, with occasional overlap for PH/UK as needed.

• Occasional travel to the UK and/or the Philippines.

Compensation & benefits

• Competitive South Africa–market compensation (ZAR)

• Equity/phantom options available for exceptional candidates.

• Co-working space (Workshop 17 Waterfront)

• Home office & connectivity allowance; learning budget for certifications/conferences.

• Paid time off aligned to SA standards and public holidays.