Head of Engineering, Rewards

we are looking for our Head of Engineering, Rewards to join us in South Africa. About The Role Rewards is one of the most strategically important platforms at Moniepoint, and it is being built into a dedicated charter with its own engineering and product leadership. The platform sits at the centre of our retention strategy across a user base of approximately 23 million people. Today the platform does one thing: cashback. It works, but it has barely scratched the surface of what rewards can be, and the cashback product itself is not yet built to the depth it deserves. The ambition is to evolve it into a full rewards, retention, engagement and personalisation platform — and to do that across the full 360 degrees of our network. That means rewards for our business customers, rewards for our consumer customers, and rewards for the sales agents who drive our distribution. Very few companies get to design this from close to a blank page at this scale. The Head of Engineering owns that platform end to end. You will inherit a team of nine engineers, including an Engineering Manager, and build the organisation out from there — the current expectation is a minimum of three product units and upwards of 25 people, though the eventual shape is genuinely yours to define. Your first objective is to get the best possible performance out of the cashback product we already have. From there, you will work with Growth, Sales and Marketing to determine what we build for acquisition and retention, and roll it out across every customer we serve. This is a consumer-facing product engineering role, and that is the most important thing to understand about it. Rewards is won or lost on experimentation, personalisation, and the quality of the experience in a customer's hands. We are looking for a leader who has built and shipped direct-to-consumer products at scale, who is fluent in experimentation and A/B testing, and who has real depth in front-end and mobile engineering — not a purely backend platform leader. Moniepoint runs a Domain CTO model. We view our Heads of Engineering as the CTO of their domain: you own the technical roadmap, the architecture, the delivery, and the organisation beneath you. You will have full autonomy over engineering strategy, architecture, hiring, operating cadence and roadmap trade-offs. You will report functionally to our Group CTO, with a dual reporting line into the Product leader for Rewards. That second line is a delivery relationship rather than a seniority one — engineering and product are peers here, and you will build the team to full capacity together. Your responsibilities as Head of Engineering, Rewards includes: Owning the technical strategy, architecture and roadmap for the Rewards Platform end to end. Improving the performance, reliability and depth of the existing cashback product as an immediate first priority. Evolving cashback into a broader rewards, retention, engagement and personalisation platform serving business customers, consumer customers and sales agents. Building the engineering organisation from its current base - structuring product units, hiring engineers and Engineering Managers, and leading through those managers as the team scales. Establishing a strong experimentation culture: A/B testing, cohort analysis, and measurement that lets the team learn quickly what actually changes customer behaviour. Working closely with Growth, Sales and Marketing to translate acquisition and retention objectives into product and engineering initiatives. Owning the customer-facing experience of rewards across mobile and web, including how quickly and reliably customers receive what they have earned. Define architecture standards, engineering processes and quality metrics, and own the engineering health of the domain — incidents, production defects, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and developer experience. Build the platform to serve customers across multiple geographies as Moniepoint expands. Partner with Product to define the rewards-specific metrics and OKRs that do not yet exist, and hold the team to them. Who You Are Direct-to-consumer product engineering at scale. You have built and shipped products used directly by large consumer audiences, and you understand what moves engagement and retention. This is the defining requirement of the role. Genuine front-end and mobile depth. You have led or personally built consumer-facing mobile and web experiences. A backend-only background, however strong, is not what this role needs. Experimentation and growth engineering. Hands-on experience running A/B tests, feature flagging, and measurement frameworks, and using the results to drive product decisions rather than to justify them. At least 5 years of experience managing managers — leading an engineering organisation through other engineering leaders, not a single team. Hands-on technical leadership. You are still close to the code. We expect a meaningful proportion of hands-on engineering time and technical credibility with the engineers you lead. 10+ years of overall software engineering experience, with at least 5 years leading engineering teams through growth phases. Comfort with our backend environment — Java and Spring Boot — and the ability to lead backend engineers credibly, even if it is not where your own depth sits. Experience building and scaling an engineering organisation from a small base, including hiring and developing Engineering Managers. Strong collaboration with commercial stakeholders — growth, marketing and sales — and the ability to translate business objectives into engineering work. Rewards, loyalty, gamification, personalisation or growth platform experience is a strong advantage but is not required. Fintech or payments experience is an advantage, not a requirement. Cultural Alignment As well, we assess every candidate across eight dimensions that define how great leaders operate at Moniepoint. We look for evidence of all eight througho