Tech Lead - Data Systems

About impact.com

impact.com is the world’s leading commerce partnership marketing platform, transforming the way businesses grow by enabling them to discover, manage, and scale partnerships across the entire customer journey. From affiliates and influencers to content publishers, brand ambassadors, and customer advocates, impact.com empowers brands to drive trusted, performance-based growth through authentic relationships. Its award-winning products—Performance (affiliate), Creator (influencer), and Advocate (customer referral)—unify every type of partner into one integrated platform. As consumers increasingly rely on recommendations from people and communities they trust, impact.com helps brands show up where it matters most. Today, over 5,000 global brands, including Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L’Oréal, and Fanatics, rely on impact.com to power more than 225,000 partnerships that deliver measurable business results.

Your Role at impact.com:

As a Senior Software Engineer, Tech Lead for Data Systems, you will lead a squad of engineers focused on designing, building, and maintaining data systems that are maintainable, reliable, and understandable at scale. You will set technical direction, own squad-level delivery outcomes, and manage the health and growth of your team - all while remaining a strong hands-on engineering contributor.

This role is centered on designing resilient distributed systems, including handling retries, partial failures, backpressure, and consistency tradeoffs. You will set the bar for clear interfaces, strong tests, and solid observability (metrics and tracing) so our systems are easy to run, debug, and evolve - and hold the team to that bar consistently.

You are expected to function as the primary technical and people leader for your squad: breaking down complex problems into well-defined units of work, driving planning and cross-team alignment, governing releases and stability, and developing your direct reports through coaching and feedback.

This is a software engineering leadership role, not a data analysis/statistical role or an ETL/SQL-focused role.

Essential Responsibilities

• Own squad-level delivery, technical direction, and outcomes (quality, stability, deadlines) across multiple workstreams

• Provide direct people management: coaching, performance feedback, career development, delegation, hiring input, and team health

• Set and align technical approach for the squad; make or drive key decisions, resolve cross-engineer disagreements, and ensure designs fit architecture and guidelines

• Drive coordination to meet quarterly objectives - work breakdown, sequencing, dependency management, and alignment with stakeholders across a distributed team

• Serve as the final accountable approver for PRs, release readiness, point releases, and build/stage stability; ensure operational discipline is followed

• Own timely incident response patterns, drive follow-up, ensure preventative actions happen (not just fixes), and improve processes to reduce recurrence

• Set engineering standards for the squad (documentation expectations, review rigor, testing discipline, quality bars) and ensure consistency

• Break down complex data logic into small, testable units and model this practice for the team

• Instrument systems with strong observability - metrics and tracing - to support debugging and operational confidence

• Develop code both independently and while pair programming

This is intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by people assigned to this job. It is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, skills, efforts, or working conditions associated with the job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Required Qualifications

Education & Experience

• Completed B.S. in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent professional experience

• 4+ years of Software Development experience, including experience leading or tech-leading a team

Technical Skills (Non-Negotiable)

• Comfort and proficiency in a typed language such as Java, Scala, or Kotlin

• Strong software engineering habits: modularity, testing, abstraction

• Proven ability to set and evolve technical direction for a squad or workstream

• Knowledge of software design patterns and the ability to select and implement the right pattern for a given problem

• Experience with Test-Driven Development (TDD) and building meaningful test suites

• Familiarity with Continuous Integration / Delivery methods, tooling, and integrations

Competencies

• Strong analytical thinking and problem-solving skills

• People leadership - ability to coach, give feedback, and develop engineers at varying levels

• Ability to drive planning, sequencing, and cross-team alignment across a distributed team

• Attention to detail and commitment to raising and maintaining quality standards for the team

• Critical thinking and creative problem-solving

• Ability to communicate clearly and show engagement in both remote and in-person meetings; comfortable presenting technical direction to stakeholders

Work Requirements

• Must be willing to work 2 days per week in office for collaboration with the team

• Currently based locally in Cape Town or willing to relocate

Nice-to-Have Qualifications

• Curiosity about distributed data systems (Spark experience is a plus, but not required)

• Experience breaking down complex data logic into small, testable units

• Exposure to any Google Cloud technology

• Experience with large-scale data processing systems

• Experience with monitoring, alerting, and production support

• Open-source contributions

What We're Looking For in a Teammate

• Curious - asks good questions, seeks to understand the "why" behind decisions

• Flexible - willing to change direction when priorities shift

• Hungry - a self-starter who takes initiative and owns their work and their team's outcomes

• Humble - open to feedback, eager to learn and grow, and models this for their reports

• Communicative - shows engagement and clarity in both remote and in-person settings

• Accountable - takes ownership of commitments and outcomes at both the individual and squad level

Benefits and Perks:

At impact.com, we believe that when you’re happy and fulfilled, you do your best work. That’s why we’ve built a benefits package that supports your well-being, growth, and work-life balance.

• Flexible Working: Our Responsible PTO policy means you can take the time off you need to rest and recharge. We're committed to a positive work-life balance and provide a flexible environment that allows you to be happy and fulfilled in both your career and your personal life.

• Health and Wellness: Your well-being is a priority. Our mental health and wellness benefit includes up to 12 fully covered therapy/coaching sessions per year, with additional dependent coverage. We also offer a monthly gym reimbursement policy to support your physical health.

• A Stake in Our Growth: We offer Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) as part of our total compensation, giving you a stake in the company's growth with a 3-year vesting schedule, pending Board approval.

• Investing in Your Growth: We’re committed to your continuous learning. Take advantage of our free Coursera subscription and our PXA courses.

• Parental Support: We offer a generous parental leave policy, 26 weeks of fully paid leave for the primary caregiver and 13 weeks fully paid leave for the secondary caregiver.

• Technology Financial Support: We provide a technology stipend to help you set up your home office and a monthly allowance to cover your internet expenses

impact.com is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. All employees and applicants for employment shall be given fair treatment and equal employment opportunity regardless of their race, ethnicity or ancestry, color or caste, religion or belief, age, sex (including gender identity, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, pregnancy/maternity), national origin, weight, neurodivergence, disability, marital and civil partnership status, caregiving status, veteran status, genetic information, political affiliation, or other prohibited non-merit factors.