Technical Lead: AI Engineering & Modernisation

homechoice is a leading South African homeware retailer. For over 40 years we’ve helped our customers create beautiful homes they love with an innovative range of quality products they can afford.. Our aim is to provide multiple, convenient and easy retail shopping channels to guarantee that we meet all our customer expectations.

Behind that sits a substantial technology estate: a cloud-native micro-service platform, a C#/.NET and SQL Server core, React front-ends, Dynamics AX 2012 R3, and long-lived legacy systems, including Delphi 4, that still carry real revenue. We are not experimenting with AI at the edges. We are changing how software is designed, written, tested and modernised across the whole engineering function. This role What you will love doing in this role

AI-assisted engineering and adoption

• Own homechoice’s AI engineering strategy, including tooling, standards, evaluation, rollout and measurement
• Establish practical AI-assisted development workflows, including repo conventions, context standards, prompt practices and code review expectations
• Build clear guardrails for secure, responsible and compliant AI usage across engineering

Test automation and engineering quality

• Own the test automation strategy across unit, integration, contract, API, UI and data layers
• Use AI to improve test generation, particularly for legacy code with limited existing coverage
• Embed quality gates into CI/CD to improve reliability, security and delivery confidence

Legacy modernisation and technical leadership

• Assess the legacy estate and produce a sequenced, costed modernisation roadmap
• Lead priority modernisation work from planning through to production delivery
• Mentor senior engineers and technical leads, raise engineering standards and support delivery squads with complex technical decisions

Day-to-day delivery

• Work within an engineering delivery squad to deliver enhancements, new initiatives and live issue resolution
• Partner with the Software Architect to ensure delivery remains aligned to architectural guidelines
• Stay hands-on and build credibility by shipping quality software alongside the team

What you’ll need to do this role

• Computer Science related degree, diploma or equivalent demonstrated depth
• 10+ years’ software engineering experience, including experience as a technical lead, staff engineer or principal engineer in a production environment
• Deep hands-on experience in C#/.NET, Web API and SQL Server
• Current experience using AI-assisted software engineering tools, including agentic coding, LLM-assisted refactoring, test generation and context engineering
• Proven legacy modernisation experience delivered in production, including incremental extraction, parallel runs and cutover planning
• Strong test automation experience across the test pyramid, with CI/CD pipeline ownership and quality gate enforcement
• Experience delivering software through the full development life cycle, including enhancements, releases and live issue resolution
• Proven ability to influence engineering teams through evidence, mentoring and practical technical leadership
• AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, event-driven architecture, ERP modernisation, observability tooling or POPIA / PCI DSS / ISO 27001 exposure would be advantageous

What we will love about you

• You are rigorous, evidence-led and comfortable being challenged on your technical decisions
• You measure before and after, and can show the impact of engineering improvement work
• You are pragmatic and prefer simple, working solutions over unnecessary complexity
• You are self-directed, able to identify constraints and drive meaningful progress without needing to be chased
• You are generous with knowledge and motivated by raising the capability of the wider engineering team
• You communicate clearly in writing and can produce standards, assessments and roadmaps that people understand and use

Behaviors we love

Wow my customer

• Walk in my customers’ shoes
• Deliver on my promises
• Deliver insight-led solutions my customers need

Treat the business as my own

• Take accountability
• Be curious, creative & explore opportunities
• Do it right & at the right time

Play as a team

• Be helpful
• Be inclusive
• the fun