Platform Owner: Technical Agility

About Sanlam Corporate

Sanlam Corporate forms part of the Sanlam Group which offers retail and corporate life insurance, health and investment products in South Africa. Our vision is to be the preferred partner to Corporate and Public Sector by providing awesome client experience and comprehensive solutions that enable the financial resilience and prosperity of those entities and their employees.

We believe in creating and cultivating a positive, diverse, energised working environment that gives every individual the opportunity to achieve success and deliver meaningful value.

The overall purpose of the role

The Platform Owner for Technical Agility is accountable for the end-to-end ownership, evolution, and optimisation of the enterprise Technical Agility Platform, with a strong focus on AWS cloud-native architectures, Azure DevOps cloud services, and modern DevSecOps operating models.

This role provides deep subject-matter expertise and strategic leadership across CI/CD platforms, cloud infrastructure enablement, DevSecOps tooling, and developer experience, ensuring scalable, secure, and compliant software delivery across the organisation.

The role owns the design, governance, implementation, and continuous improvement of the Technical Agility platform, ensuring alignment with SAFe, cloud strategies, and enterprise architecture standards, while driving measurable improvements in delivery speed, reliability, security posture, and cost efficiency.

Overview of Responsibilities

•    Ensure technical agility domain meets the requirements of all stakeholders to including business change, technology and operations.
•    Ensure industry best practice is being adopted and aligned in terms of Infrastructure Architecture; Continuous Delivery and Integration; Deployment; Security and Test automation.
•    Responsible for defining the System Development Life Cycle methodology and associated cross-functional tools to ensure adoption and continuous improvement in alignment with SAFE
•    Define and drive adoption of technical agility platform principles / standards – ensuring adherence to blueprints
•    Partner with platform owners, Architecture, infrastructure and business Agility to deliver a clear technical roadmap for the platform.
•    Promotes, documents, and implements best practices, building tools that allow SC-IT to develop and deploy impeccable software
•    collaborates with the quality assurance department in creating solution designs, capacity planning, and performance optimisation.
•    Leverage industry-leading business processes to improve business agility and technical agility for shorter cycle times.
•    Proactive identification of platform enhancements including non-functional enhancement
•    Work collaboratively with business stakeholders and operational teams to support prioritisation of changes and defect backlog prioritisation
•    Act as point of escalation for Platform related Defects and Major Incidents resolution
•    Build and maintain a relationship network with key stakeholders in technology and business
•    Maintain an understanding of the existing and potential platform capabilities
•    Define target platform structure, drive transformation to reach the target and govern adherence
•    Ensure solution design supports the goal of a right first time, reducing time to market / minimises cost to deliver whilst meeting the business requirements
•    Act as the final escalation point for platform-related: Major Incidents, Platform defects, Systemic CI/CD failures.
•    Ensure high availability, scalability, and performance of Azure DevOps services and agent infrastructure, AWS build and runtime environments
•    Deep understanding of Kubernetes control plane concepts, etcd considerations, node lifecycle, autoscaling strategies (Cluster Autoscaler/Karpenter), and capacity planning.
•    Practical experience managing container registries

Qualifications & Certifications Description

•    Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related technical field.
•    Microsoft AzureDevOps
•    Microsoft Certified: Azure DevOps Engineer Expert
•    AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional or Solutions Architect – Associate/Professional
•    SAFE for DevOps
•    SAFE Practitioner
•    Relevant IT certifications (e.g. COBIT, ITIL, JIRA etc.) is advantageous.
•    Experience in a Dev Ops environment and leading the development automation 
•    8 – 10 years at a senior manager level managing a multi-discipline team across technologies.
•    Relevant governance or service management certifications (ITIL, COBIT) are advantageous.

Experience Required

•    8–10 years in DevOps / Platform / Cloud Engineering leadership
•    5- 10 years System development life cycle with a specific focus on agile development – DevOps
•    DevOps Tooling strategy development and implementation
•    Strong analytical, problem-solving and conflict resolution skills.
•    Proven experience owning enterprise CI/CD platforms at scale
•    Experience defining and governing SDLC and DevSecOps frameworks in regulated environments
•    Knowledge of various toolsets such as Jira, Azure DevOps and Agile testing tools
•    Exceptional analytical, conceptual, and problem-solving abilities.
•    3–5+ years designing, operating, and governing Kubernetes platforms in enterprise environments (self-managed and/or managed services such as EKS/AKS).
•    Highly self-motivated to deliver both independently and with strong team collaboration.
•    Strong written and oral communications along with presentation and interpersonal skills.
•    Working knowledge of agile methodology, techniques, and frameworks
Interpretive / Tactical – Interprets plan and how actions into deliverables

Core Competencies

• Strategic Thinking – Ability to translate business strategy into organisational capability.Cultivates Innovation - Creating new and better ways for the organisation to be successful.
• Client Focus - Building strong customer relationships and delivering customer-centric solutions.
• Drives Results - Consistently achieving results, even under tough circumstances.
• Collaborates - Building partnerships and working collaboratively with others to meet shared objectives.
• Resilience - Rebounding from setbacks and adversity when facing difficult situations.

Build a successful career with us

We’re all about building strong, lasting relationships with our employees. We know that you have hopes for your future – your career, your personal development and of achieving great things. We pride ourselves in helping  our employees to realise their worth. Through its five business clusters – Sanlam Fintech, Sanlam Life and Savings, Sanlam Investment Group, Sanlam Allianz, Santam, as well as MiWay and the Group Office – the group provides many opportunities for growth and development.

Turnaround time

The shortlisting process will only start once the application due date has been reached. The time taken to complete this process will depend on how far you progress and the availability of managers. Closing date 6th August 2026.

Our commitment to transformation

The Sanlam Group is committed to achieving transformation and embraces diversity. This commitment is what drives us to achieve a diverse, inclusive and equitable workplace as we believe that these are key components to ensuring a thriving and sustainable business in South Africa. The Group's Employment Equity plan and targets will be considered as part of the selection process.