Software Development Manager

Amazon Development Centre South Africa is seeking a very strong technical leader to manage and grow an engineering team. This requires a thorough knowledge of what it takes to develop scalable, extensible technology, as well as how to structure and develop organizations. This presents a significant intellectual, technical and operational challenge. Amazon Web Services provides Amazon's developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. The Cape Town based Development Center plays a key role in building the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is the web service that is pioneering cloud computing by providing resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It gives any developer complete control of their computing resources and lets them run on Amazon's proven computing environment. We are continuing to build the team in order to expand on our feature set and manage our rapidly increasing scale. We are expanding our capacity management initiatives to support high growth at large scales and create novel markets to support the computing needs of our customers.

The ideal candidate will be clearly passionate about the large opportunity that Amazon EC2 presents and about web services in general. This person has thrived and succeeded in delivering high quality solutions in a hyper-growth environment where priorities shift fast. The position demands excellent technical skills and knowledge coupled with strong leadership, planning, and management abilities. Knowledge and experience with one or more development methodologies, and experience developing engineering process is required.

Key responsibilities:

• Translation of complex functional and technical requirements into detailed project plans and schedules; manage the day-to-day activities of the engineering team by defining, implementing and maintaining a coherent, progressive development strategy for our product line.
• Responsible for the over-all systems development life cycle
• Delivery of quality applications on-time and on-budget
• Management and execution against project plans and delivery commitments
• Management of departmental resources, staffing, and enhancing and maintaining a best- of-class engineering team
• Evolution of the software engineering practice within the organization, including better reporting, tools, and evolution of development methodology
• Work closely with the architects to develop the best technical design and approach for product development
• Maintain current technical knowledge to support rapidly changing technology
• Continue to build an effective development organization by driving the recruiting and hiring of senior level engineers, developing and managing the group, and conducting performance reviews of team members
• Create and execute appropriate quality plans, project plans, test strategies and processes for development activities in concert with business and project management efforts.
• Develop and execute unit testing strategy and processes.
• Drive and manage the bug triage process, represent development team in project meetings to ensure efficient testing and bug fixing process, and be an effective advocate for the development group
• Report on status of product quality to management, customer support and product teams via rigorous execution of detailed plans and accurate reporting of test cases executed, bugs discovered, bugs fixed, etc.

The following will help ensure a successful application:

• Strong customer focus
• Strong desire to build, sense of ownership, urgency, and drive.
• 5-10 years experience in Software development and 2-5 years as development Manager
• Proven results oriented person with a delivery focus and demonstrated ability to achieve stretch goals in a highly innovative and fast paced environment.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Ability to work well with people and be both highly motivated and motivating.
• Experience with Ruby, Perl, Java or C/C++.
• Experience with Java, Linux/Unix, Perl, XML, and Web services, and UNIX tools.
• 4 year University Degree or Masters in Computer Science or equivalent
• Strong analytical skills with excellent problem solving abilities.
• Strong technical vision.
• Strong presentation and leadership skills.
• Ability to handle multiple competing priorities in a fast-paced environment
• Previous demonstrated project management success on similar projects emphasis placed on experience with high-volume web-based applications

click here to apply