Lead Software Engineer: Cloud Modernisation
Why Entersekt
Founded over 16 years ago, with more recent investments from Accel-KKR, Entersekt is a leader in digital banking fraud prevention and payment security, including mobile authentication, mobile app security, and 3-D Secure authentication for issuers, acquirers and payment networks. We offer highly scalable products with a track record of success across multiple continents.
Entersekt enables secure digital transactions for leading financial institutions globally. We exist to create a world where everyone can transact digitally without fear or compromise. Currently, we protect the digital transactions of over 210 million active users on our platform and hold 120 active patents that recognize innovation in digital security, payments, and user experience. Entersekt offers customers secure authentication and digital payments experiences that remove unnecessary friction. Entersekt has a diverse product portfolio and aggressive roadmap that positions the company well to sustain competitive advantage as it expands globally with emphasis on North America and European markets.
The Ideal Candidate
The Lead Software Engineer: Cloud Modernisation will play a key role in advancing Entersekt’s transition toward cloud-ready and cloud-native architectures across the company’s SaaS product suite. This role combines senior technical leadership with hands-on engineering delivery.
You are an experienced engineer who is comfortable working directly within complex production codebases while also shaping architectural direction and modernisation strategy. You bring a pragmatic mindset when working with legacy systems and understand how to balance performance, cost efficiency, operational reliability, and delivery timelines when introducing cloud-native patterns.
The successful candidate will guide the modernisation of existing systems by introducing scalable architecture patterns, automation, and operational improvements while partnering closely with product engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, security, compliance, and product management teams.
Initial focus for this role will be the modernisation of Entersekt’s 3DS product suite, with patterns, architectural approaches, and enablement efforts expected to scale across the broader SaaS platform over time.
The Role
This is a senior individual contributor role operating at Lead Engineer level. The role combines architectural leadership with hands-on engineering execution and is responsible for defining and delivering the modernisation roadmap for key product systems.
The Lead Software Engineer will assess previous generation (heritage) components, design target-state architecture, and implement modernisation improvements directly in product codebases. The role will introduce modern engineering practices and cloud-native patterns while establishing guardrails, reference implementations, and repeatable approaches that product teams can adopt.
The position plays an important role in enabling a scalable SaaS operating model by improving automation, observability, deployment consistency, and tenant lifecycle management. Through close collaboration with engineering and platform teams, the role will help accelerate cloud-native delivery while maintaining strong operational, security, and regulatory standards.
Responsibilities
Modernisation Strategy, Roadmap and Architecture
- Define modernisation roadmaps for product applications, including target-state architecture for services, infrastructure, and data flows.
- Assess legacy components to identify modernisation opportunities, technical debt, and pragmatic remediation paths.
- Determine appropriate modernisation approaches including refactoring, re-platforming, or re-architecting based on performance, cost, risk, and delivery considerations.
- Contribute architectural insight to the modernisation business case and support financial modelling related to infrastructure and platform decisions.
Engineering Delivery
- Implement modernisation changes directly within product codebases, including refactoring legacy components and decomposing monolithic architectures.
- Introduce cloud-native engineering patterns such as microservices, event-driven architecture, containerisation, and serverless services.
- Identify and implement performance, scalability, and reliability improvements using observability platforms, cloud metrics, and logging tools.
- Develop reference implementations and engineering patterns that enable teams to accelerate modernisation across products.
- Drive code-level implementation decisions and ensure successful delivery of modernisation outcomes across multiple engineering teams.
SaaS Platform and Operational Modernisation
- Improve the operational and platform capabilities that support Entersekt’s SaaS delivery model.
- Reduce reliance on manual operational processes and bespoke scripts by introducing automation across tenant lifecycle management.
- Design and implement repeatable processes for tenant provisioning, configuration, and environment management.
- Improve onboarding speed for new tenants through standardised workflows and environment templates.
- Establish tenant-aware observability by improving consistency of logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, and alerting across services.
- Contribute to multi-tenant architecture design, including tenant isolation and service tiering considerations.
- Improve deployment consistency through repeatable deployment patterns, automation, and safer release processes.
Engineering Standards and Governance
- Introduce practical engineering guardrails that support modern development practices including API-first design, event streaming, cloud-native storage, and container orchestration.
- Define and maintain architectural standards, patterns, and best practices for cloud-native development.
- Contribute to cloud governance initiatives and participate in architecture reviews that guide engineering teams through modernisation efforts.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Lead technical workshops, architecture discussions, and design reviews across product teams.
- Support engineering teams in translating modernisation objectives into practical implementation changes.
- Partner closely with DevOps, Platform Engineering, Cybersecurity, Compliance, and Product teams to ensure modernisation initiatives align with operational and regulatory requirements.
- Build trust with engineering teams by introducing modern practices through collaborative design and working reference implementations.
Team Development
- As the modernisation programme evolves, contribute to shaping a small, specialised engineering capability that supports broader platform modernisation initiatives.
- Maintain a strong hands-on focus while helping teams adopt new patterns and technologies.
Success Measures (First 12 Months)
Success in this role will be measured by the ability to deliver meaningful modernisation outcomes across Entersekt’s SaaS platform while establishing scalable engineering patterns that enable teams to accelerate cloud-native delivery.
Key outcomes in the first 12 months may include:
- Completing a comprehensive architectural assessment of the 3DS product suite, identifying key modernisation opportunities, technical constraints, and priority areas for improvement.
- Delivering a modernisation roadmap and migration plan that clearly defines architectural direction, sequencing, and the associated performance, operational, and cost considerations.
- Successfully modernising at least one product or major product component, resulting in measurable improvements in system operability, maintainability, and performance.
- Reducing reliance on manual operational processes and bespoke scripts through the introduction of automated tenant lifecycle management and environment provisioning.
- Improving observability and operational readiness by introducing consistent logging, metrics, dashboards, and alerting across services and tenants.
- Contributing architectural insights and cost considerations to the modernisation business case, supporting decision-making around infrastructure and platform investments.
- Establishing trusted working relationships with product and platform engineering teams by delivering working modernisation patterns and reference implementations that teams can adopt.
- Contributing to the development of a long-term platform architecture roadmap that supports modernisation across multiple products within the Entersekt SaaS ecosystem.
Skills and Experience
Successful candidates for this role will generally possess the following qualifications and skills:
- Demonstrated experience designing and delivering application modernisation programmes within AWS environments.
- Experience modernising applications through refactoring, re-platforming, or re-architecting legacy systems.
- Strong experience building and operating production systems using containers and orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes (or equivalent platforms).
- Solid backend engineering experience with the ability to diagnose and improve performance, scalability, and reliability in production systems.
- Experience working with Java-based systems or comparable backend development stacks.
- Proven experience implementing modern architectural patterns such as microservices, event-driven architectures, and distributed systems.
- Experience improving operational maturity through automation, observability, monitoring, and repeatable deployment processes.
- 8+ years of experience in cloud architecture, platform engineering, or senior software engineering roles responsible for production systems.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills with the ability to influence engineering, product, and platform teams.
- AWS certification is advantageous but not required.
Personality Attributes
- Strong bias toward delivery with a willingness to work hands-on in complex production systems.
- Pragmatic and comfortable working with legacy environments while introducing modern engineering approaches.
- Ability to influence teams through working solutions, reference implementations, and practical improvements.
- Systems thinker who balances architecture decisions with operational reliability, cost management, and security.
- Collaborative team player who builds trust across engineering teams through clear communication and inclusive technical leadership.
- Maintains accountability for delivering measurable outcomes while enabling teams to adopt modern engineering practices.
We place a lot of value on how we treat prospective employees and appreciate the time and effort that goes into job hunting. That is why we aim to keep the hiring process as quick and seamless as possible while ensuring the best possible fit for both you and the company.
Working at Entersekt is truly a dream. You get exposed to cutting-edge technology, colleagues who are leaders in their fields, and an awesome working environment that includes flexible hours, remote work, and plenty of growth opportunities.
Apply for this position by following the "apply now" tab and or viewing our other roles at Entersekt Careers page.
Entersekt is an Equal Opportunity Employer:
We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse workforce that reflects the global communities we serve. For all South Africa-based roles, preference will be given to candidates from historically disadvantaged groups, in accordance with local Employment Equity objectives.