Developer (Junior)
Discovery Ltd.
Sandton, Gauteng
Customer service roles in retail, banking and BPO reward strong communicators and are a common entry point for matriculants.
This listing does not state a salary. As a guide, customer service roles in South Africa typically pay R7 000 to R17 000 a month (indicative).
Job description
Business Unit: Discovery Health Function: Development (Oracle/Delphi/Magic/etc) Date: 3 Jul 2026 Discovery – Health| Data Science Lab
Junior Developer
About Discovery
Discovery’s core purpose is to make people healthier and to enhance and protect their lives. We seek out and invest in exceptional individuals who understand and support our core purpose, and whose own values align with those of Discovery. Our fast-paced and dynamic environment enables smart, self-driven people to be their best. As global thought leaders, Discovery is passionate about innovating in order to not only achieve financial success, but to ignite positive and meaningful change within our society.
About Data Science Lab
The Group Data Science Lab (DS Lab) is expanding, and we’re looking for talented individuals to join our growing team. Our global team collaborates with partners such as Discovery Health Digital, Quantium Health, Risk Intelligence, and leading academic institutions such as the London School of Economics (LSE).
We operate across digital, clinical, wellness, and behavioural domains, leveraging terabytes of structured and unstructured data within a modern big data ecosystem. Our work spans a wide range of impactful and innovative solutions, including Personal Health Pathways (PHP), Vitality Sleep, and personalised member engagement through advanced communication and recommendation systems. We design and deploy recommender systems that drive tailored interventions, and build intelligent capabilities such as agentic AI for health operations and AI-driven customer support agents.
In addition, the DS Lab is actively involved in causal and behavioural health analytics, enabling a deeper understanding of member behaviour and driving evidence-based interventions that improve health outcomes. We continuously explore and apply emerging AI paradigms, ensuring that our solutions are not only innovative but also scalable, practical, and aligned to real-world impact.
The DS Lab follows a forward-thinking approach, continuously identifying new data opportunities and building scalable, future-ready solutions through platforms such as Vitality.AI. Within this environment, the AI Enablement team plays a critical role in operationalising, maintaining, and scaling AI/ML solutions, ensuring that models, pipelines, and platforms are production-ready, reliable, and continuously delivering value to the business.
Key Purpose
The Junior Developer supports the development, operationalisation, reliability, and continuous improvement of software platform, and AI/ML solutions, and data products. The role focuses on translating technical requirements into high-quality, maintainable code, while supporting the deployment, monitoring, and ongoing maintenance of machine learning pipelines and platform services. The role bridges development and operations by contributing to platform engineering, DevOps, and service management, ensuring that AI solutions are effectively delivered and sustained in production environments. This includes ensuring that systems are stable, scalable, production-ready, efficiently deployed through CI/CD pipelines, continuously improved, and aligned with business requirements and technical standards
Key outputs
The successful applicant will be responsible for but not limited to the following job functions:
Areas of responsibility may include but not limited to Software Development & Test Automation
- Collaborate with Data Scientists, Architects, Analysts, and Platform teams to implement technical specifications using appropriate development languages (primarily Python and SQL) in alignment with established engineering standards and architectural patterns
- Develop high-quality, production-grade source code that adheres to DHS technical standards, leveraging existing system components, exposed services, and reusable sub-processes
- Build and maintain Python-based utilities and scripts to support operational workflows, including: Data quality checks and validation, log parsing and analysis, and automation of repetitive support and maintenance tasks
- Write and optimise SQL queries within Google Cloud Platform (GCP) environments to support production investigations, root cause analysis, data validation and reconciliation, ad hoc analysis and issue diagnosis
- Design, implement, and maintain automated testing frameworks, including unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end (E2E) testing for pipelines and services, and test data management
- Contribute to code quality, security, and compliance practices, including static analysis, linting, and secure coding standards
- Maintain and enhance technical documentation for: system and architecture documentation, code-level documentation, development guidelines, database schemas, structure updates, and rule changes
- Update and manage work items in Agile/DevOps tooling (e.g., Jira), ensuring traceability of changes and alignment to delivery processes
- Participate in pair programming, code reviews, and knowledge-sharing activities to promote best practices and continuous team development
- Support ongoing refactoring and optimisation of existing codebases to improve performance, scalability, and maintainability
Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
- Contribute to CI/CD pipelines for automated build, test, and deployment processes
- Assist in managing configurations and environment setup
- Work with cloud platforms (primarily GCP) and containerised environments
- Support release processes with a focus on stability and zero-defect delivery
- Monitor pipeline health and troubleshoot failed builds or deployments
- Continuously build skills in cloud, DevOps, and AI/ML technologies
Platform Engineering & Operations Support
- Execute production deployments and verify the post-release health, stability, availability and responsiveness of deployed services
- Participate in the process of reviewing code for consistent application of standards, logic and
effective use of libraries and reusable aspects of the application.
- Find and report operational issues and execute configuration changes
- Coordinate with multiple platform teams to monitor system resources,
- Manage platform services alerts and respond to incidents escalated by the Incidents team.
- Conduct Root Cause Analysis (RCAs) for bugs, defects and other types of problems (including writing clear and concise incident reports and communications)
- Log issues in the appropriate issues tracking system.
- Conduct analysis on issues.
- Verify and validate build stability.
- Conduct end-to-end testing and fix any defects found.
- Review error logs and provide updates on fixes found in testing.
- Monitor CI/CI and AI/ML pipelines, diagnosing failed builds and deployments
- Understand the relationship between pipeline stages, environments, and production deployments, and retrigger rollbacks
- Maintain awareness of all pipeline components
- Participate in on-call rotations for IT Service Management and incident response and support
Personal Attributes and Skills The successful candidate would need to have the following competencies:
Behavioural skills
- Strong learning orientation with a willingness to continuously build technical and domain knowledge
- Structured and analytical approach to problem solving and debugging
- Effective prioritisation, planning, and organisation of tasks
- Ability to work under pressure and manage competing deadlines
- Proactive, action-oriented mindset with a collaborative approach to teamwork
Core Technical Skills
- Programming: Python (primary) and SQL, with the ability to write clean, efficient, and production-ready code for data processing, automation, and backend services
- Computer Science Foundations: Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, and software
Good to know
What does this customer service job pay?
This listing does not state a salary. As a guide, customer service roles in South Africa typically pay R7 000 to R17 000 a month (indicative).
Do I need experience for customer service jobs in Sandton?
Many customer service roles in Sandton are open to candidates with little or no experience. Read the listing for its exact requirements.
How do I apply for this job?
Tap "Apply on Indeed" to open the original listing, where you can read the full description and apply directly. JobsZA never charges you to apply, and you should never pay money to get a job.
Found on Indeed · Posted Yesterday