Mobile Engineering Lead

About this role

Virgin Active South Africa is looking for a Mobile Engineering Lead in Cape Town. The club is moving towards a social wellness model, and this role helps build the member app and its backend services. The app will be run by one central team on a single codebase, so features can roll out faster across countries.

What you’ll do

• Lead design and architecture discussions for mobile and backend systems.
• Set coding standards, run code reviews and push good engineering habits across the team.
• Be the first point of contact for hard technical problems.
• Coach engineers on technical skills, system design and problem-solving.
• Write and review code yourself, so the code stays clean and easy to maintain.
• Own technical projects from design through to release, and keep the backlog in order.
• Work with product, design, data and operations teams to plan the technical roadmap.
• Explain technical progress, risks and trade-offs to leadership and other stakeholders.

What you need

• A Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field, or equivalent professional experience in software engineering and team leadership.
• At least 8 years of professional software development experience.
• At least 3 years leading people or teams as an Engineering Lead or Tech Lead.
• Experience leading a team of engineers, ideally 5 or more developers, while still coding.
• Strong hands-on skills in mobile app development, native or cross-platform.
• Experience designing scalable, fast and maintainable systems.
• Experience connecting mobile apps to backend systems, APIs and third-party services.
• A solid understanding of RESTful APIs and integration patterns.
• Experience mentoring engineers and running code reviews.
• Strong problem-solving, debugging and communication skills.
• Advantageous: exposure to CI/CD, automated testing, monitoring and DevOps practices.
• Advantageous: experience owning payment integrations end to end with providers such as Adyen, Stripe or Peach Payments.
• Advantageous: experience integrating with membership or subscription management platforms.
• Advantageous: experience with Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) or similar cross-platform environments.
• Advantageous: familiarity with Agile or Scrum delivery and experience scaling engineering teams or codebases.
• Advantageous: experience working with distributed, remote or hybrid engineering teams.

Is this job for you?

This job suits a senior engineer who enjoys writing code and leading people at the same time. You should be comfortable making big technical decisions and explaining them to non-technical stakeholders. Strong communication and a calm, patient approach to team problems matter as much as technical depth.

Tips before you apply

• Have your CV ready with a clear list of mobile apps you have built, with your role and the team size for each.
• Show your leadership years in numbers, such as the team sizes you led and the releases you delivered.
• Give short examples of payment, subscription or API integrations you have owned, and say how you handled problems.