Head of Engineering Strategy and Platform Innovation (AI Enablement)

Takealot.com, South Africa’s leading online retailer, is looking for a highly talented Head of Engineering Strategy and Platform Innovation (AI Enablement)

Think you’ve been challenged before? Think again!

• Scale: Over 4 million happy shoppers shop online on takealot.com. Show them what you can do.
• Learn: We work with the best of the best. Code alongside industry leaders and up-skill in record time.
• Grow: Expand your career in the fast-growing Takealot Group: takealot.com, and Mr D. We like to promote from within: Here’s your chance.

Who’s who in the tech space

This position reports to the CTO

Role Summary

We are a retail e-commerce business operating in a fast-changing market where customer expectations, competitive dynamics, and AI capabilities evolve rapidly. Our delivery engineering teams are heavily committed to business execution, so we are creating a senior role dedicated to ensuring our engineering strategy enables and accelerates the Group AI strategy. 

As the Head of Engineering Strategy & Platform Innovation (AI Enablement), you will own the 18–36 month engineering roadmap across AI enablement, platform engineering, and enterprise data architecture. You will work in close partnership with the Group Head of AI, who owns what AI the business will use and why; you own how engineering makes that strategy feasible—through scalable platforms, trusted data, secure reference architectures, and paved-road delivery patterns that teams can adopt quickly.

This is a high-impact role for a leader who blends enterprise architecture depth with a product mindset: turning complex strategy into real, adoptable capabilities across a large engineering organization.

Minimum Required Qualifications and Experience:

• 10+ years in an engineering leadership role (ideally in product-led organizations with cross-functional teams)
• 5+ years of software and/or platform engineering experience
• Proven track record of delivering systems and products for Web and Mobile devices
• Exposure to and regular interaction with C-Suite level leadership.

Minimum Required Competencies

• Extensive experience in enterprise-scale engineering strategy, solution/enterprise
• architecture, and cloud transformation. Deep expertise in data and database modernization and building scalable, governed data foundations.
• Strong platform engineering and DevEx orientation: you build capabilities teams actually adopt.
• Strong communication: can translate complex technical work into crisp executive narratives and practical guidance for engineers.
• Comfortable operating across strategy and hands-on proof-of-value work.

Key Responsibilities

1) Enable the Business AI Strategy (Primary Accountability)

• Partner with the Group Head of AI to translate business AI strategy into a prioritized engineering enablement roadmap (platform, data, integration patterns, operating model).
• Define and deliver the technical foundations required for competitive retail e-commerce AI use cases such as personalization, search and discovery, merchandising optimization, demand forecasting, customer service automation, fraud/risk, and supply chain decision support.
• Establish secure, repeatable patterns for building, deploying, monitoring, and governing AI-enabled capabilities at scale.

2) AI Platform Enablement & Responsible AI by Design

• Define reference architectures for AI/LLM solutions (including RAG and agentic workflows) suitable for retail e-commerce constraints: latency, peak traffic, cost, privacy,
• and brand risk.
• Set engineering standards for model/service integration, prompt and retrieval patterns, evaluation, observability, and fallback behavior.
• Implement guardrails with Security and the Group Head of AI covering privacy/PII handling, IP protection, auditability, abuse prevention, and release controls.

3) Enterprise Data Architecture & AI-Ready Data Foundations

• Own the engineering strategy for making data trusted, discoverable, governed, and AI-ready (while collaborating closely with the Head of Data/Analytics who owns data products/insights).
• Define data architecture standards for transactional and analytical domains typical in e-commerce (customer, product/catalog, pricing/promotions, orders, inventory, fulfillment, clickstream).
• Establish patterns and tooling for data quality, lineage, cataloging, and access controls embedded into platforms—not manual process.
• Drive modernization of data platforms and databases where required to support performance, availability, cost efficiency, and AI-readiness.

4) Platform Engineering & Developer Experience (Paved Roads)

• Build and roll out golden paths that make it easy for squads to deliver safely: standardized CI/CD, IaC, observability, security defaults, and service templates.
• Reduce cognitive load and variation across teams by providing reusable platform capabilities and reference implementations.
• Accelerate concept-to-production for AI-enabled features by providing paved-road deployment and operational patterns before handing them over to the owning Directors for long-term maintenance.
• Act as a high-level consultant to delivery squads, helping them navigate complex AI architectural choices.

5) Innovation Pipeline, Proof-of-Value, and Adoption

• Run disciplined, time-boxed PoCs to evaluate new technologies and approaches relevant to e-commerce speed and scale.
• Produce clear go/no-go decisions using evidence: customer impact, unit economics, operability, security/compliance, and adoption cost.
• Convert validated work into adoption kits: playbooks, templates, reference implementations, and enablement.

6) Executive Communication & Cross-Functional Leadership

• Provide clear narrative and decision support for Group CTO and EXCO: trade-offs, investments, risk posture, and expected ROI.
• Convene and drive lightweight governance forums (architecture standards, AI enablement reviews) focused on enablement—not bureaucracy.
• Build strong alignment with Product, Security, Data/Analytics, Platform/Infrastructure, and the Group Head of AI.

Key Interfaces (Clarity of Ownership)

• Group Head of AI (Business Strategy Owner): owns AI strategy, prioritization of business AI use cases, and value realization; you own the engineering strategy, platforms, and standards that enable delivery.•
• Head of Data/Analytics: owns analytics outcomes and data products; you own data architecture patterns, governance frameworks embedded in engineering platforms, and AI-ready data foundations.
• Security/CISO: co-owns security-by-design and AI/data risk controls.
• Engineering Delivery Leaders: own product execution; you provide paved roads and enablement so they can ship faster and safer.

Ideal Candidate Profile

• Extensive experience in enterprise-scale engineering strategy, solution/enterprise architecture, and cloud transformation.
• Deep expertise in data and database modernization and building scalable, governed data foundations.
• Strong platform engineering and DevEx orientation: you build capabilities teams actually adopt.
• Strong communication: can translate complex technical work into crisp executive narratives and practical guidance for engineers.
• Comfortable operating across strategy and hands-on proof-of-value work.

What Success Looks Like (12 Months)

• A published, EXCO-aligned Engineering Enablement Roadmap for Business AI Strategy (co-authored with the Group Head of AI).
• AI reference architectures and paved roads adopted by product squads for priority e-commerce use cases.
• Measurable improvements in delivery performance and reliability (lead time, MTTR, change failure rate), especially for AI-enabled features.
• Data foundations improved: clearer ownership, higher quality signals, better discoverability, and faster secure access for AI initiatives.
• A repeatable innovation-to-adoption mechanism producing shipped capabilities—not stalled experiments.

Why This Role

Retail e-commerce is increasingly won on speed, personalization, and operational intelligence. This role ensures we have the engineering and data foundations to turn AI strategy into a competitive advantage—reliably, securely, and at scale.

Let’s talk about life @ Takealot Group

• The power is in your hands: We offer a market-related Total Remuneration Package that allows full flexibility according to your needs. Go on, be the master of your own destiny.
• No doors: We aren’t fans of stuffy offices or siloed work environments. See someone you like, high-five, collab, and make something great.
• Mentorship programme: We aren’t kidding when we say the people with the best people win. Now’s your chance to be one of the best by learning from the best.
• Naspers Tech Community & Online Learning: Share ideas and grow with global industry leaders who are all just a Slack message away. Love to learn? Up-skill with free access to courses on MyAcademy, Udacity, Coursera, and more.
• Good times: Get to know the other extraordinary minds at takealot.com during regular social events and out-of-office activities (think hikes, think mini golf, think good times).
• Staff discount: Takealotmore subscriptions and millions of products across 28 departments. What more could you ask for?
• Birthday leave: Cake Day all the way. Enjoy your day off - you deserve it.
• Right tools, right job: Mac or Linux, two monitors or one. Whatever your preference, you’ll work on the latest tech, off the latest tech.
• Help when you need it most: Confidential counselling, legal support, and financial guidance, anytime, anywhere.
• Tech stack (for days): ReactJS, Python, Scala, Kotlin, Swift, Google Cloud, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes, and all things machine learning. If you build it, they will come.
• Free parking: No more 5km fun runs to your desk (unless you want to).

Like what you see?

If you meet the above, you are an Extraordinary Mind. Apply today!!

Takealot Group is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Applicants from previously disadvantaged groups and people with disabilities will be given preference.