Job Title: Product Delivery Engineer
Department: Platform Architecture and Technical Integrations
Reports To: Chief Commercial Officer
Location: Rosebank, Johannesburg
Working Hours: Standard business hours. This role may include occasional, supported after-hours deployments or incident response for Tier-1 systems (planned and communicated as far as possible). Working Arrangement: Monday to Friday, office-based
Remuneration: Market related
About Pinnacle Rewards
We operate at the complex intersection of customer engagement, loyalty mechanics, and disruptive commerce. We do not build for the next quarter; we build resilient, generational assets that compound in value over time. We operate in a high-trust, low-bureaucracy environment that values Probabilistic Thinking, empirical data over localized opinions, and long-term ecosystem expansion.
This role is anchored to our Tier-1 product systems (current and upcoming), typically spanning: – Core API services (customer/merchant/partner-facing APIs) – File ingestion & processing (S3-triggered ingestion, validation, enrichment, reconciliation-style workflows) – Member / identity services (authentication/session patterns and member-domain services) – Member/Merchant mobile app (a mobile surface area; .NET MAUI in the current stack)
The Strategic Purpose
This is not a ticket-closing “support-only” role; it is a core commercial enablement function with a structured growth path.
Your objective is to contribute to product delivery and help protect platform reliability across the Tier-1 estate: ensuring seamless, secure, and highly efficient data transmission across internal systems and external partner ecosystems. As you ramp up, your work should reduce operational friction and the Bandwidth Tax on our product and operations teams—allowing the platform to scale without a proportional increase in headcount.
What You Will Build & Oversee (Process-based Responsibilities)
- Product Delivery (Tier-1): Contribute to features across APIs, pipelines, and the member/merchant mobile app, typically starting with well-scoped changes and growing into end-to-end ownership over time.
- Architecture & Design (Serverless & API): Participate in designing and building scalable REST APIs and event-driven workflows on AWS (e.g., Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3, Cognito, SNS, SES, and other AWS services as needed), with guidance and peer review.
- Operational Excellence (CloudWatch-only): We are CloudWatch-first and CloudWatch-only for now. Help establish and improve production visibility using CloudWatch Logs, Metrics, Alarms, Dashboards, and Log Insights only. Contribute to structured logging, actionable alarms, and fast incident triage.
- Data Orchestration & Integrity: Help build and harden pipelines that protect customer trust—preventing incorrect earn/burn states, broken reconciliation flows, and partner-data drift.
- DevSecOps & POPIA: Learn and apply security controls in CI/CD. Follow least privilege, secure secrets handling, ring-fencing of personal data, and disciplined compliance with the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA).
- FinOps & Cloud Cost Optimization: Be mindful of the computational economics of Tier-1 workloads. Learn to measure cost drivers (payload size, call patterns, retries) so cloud costs scale efficiently.
- Quality & Testing Discipline: Contribute to raising the baseline for automated testing (unit/integration) and repeatable release validation.
First 90 Days (Delivery Outcomes)
We value clarity and autonomy. Your first 90 days will focus on measurable delivery and platform health, with increasing independence as you ramp up.
- 30 days: Aim to land your first production change into a Tier-1 service with review/support; map the current CloudWatch alarms/dashboards and propose the most obvious signal gaps; agree a lightweight incident “definition of done.”
- 60 days: Aim to contribute to reduced mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to recover (MTTR) by improving CloudWatch-first runbooks, dashboards, or alarms; deliver an improvement that reduces recurring support load (e.g., shared error handling, logging, or a common integration pattern).
- 90 days: Aim to deliver a meaningful product increment spanning at least two Tier-1 systems (e.g., API + file pipeline, or API + MAUI surface area), with CloudWatch telemetry showing improved reliability and/or reduced cost per transaction.
How We Measure Success (Controllable KPIs)
We believe in providing our engineers with absolute clarity and autonomy. Your performance will be objectively measured against leading indicators like:
- System Resilience: Contribute to meeting Tier-1 availability targets and continually reducing MTTR for critical incidents.
- Execution Speed: Decrease time from “ready” to production for Tier-1 work through better pipelines, smaller changes, and high-signal review.
- CloudWatch Signal Quality: Fewer “noisy” alarms; more actionable alarms tied to clear runbooks; faster root-cause isolation using Log Insights.
- Defect Escape Rate: Drive toward a near-zero rate of critical Tier-1 defects escaping to production through testing discipline and review.
- FinOps Efficiency: Help maintain or reduce the cloud cost per 10,000 relevant calls/transactions quarter-over-quarter.
Progression in this role is also reflected in increasing independence: moving from supported delivery to owning well-scoped Tier-1 outcomes.
Inherent Requirements Of The Job
(Pinnacle Rewards is an equal opportunity employer. These criteria represent the objective, inherent technical needs of the role. Reasonable accommodation will be provided for qualified persons with disabilities.)
- Education: Bachelor’s degree in computer science / information systems, a relevant technical diploma, or equivalent self-driven learning with evidence of structural software engineering competence.
- Experience: This role may suit an early-career engineer (including internships / graduate experience) with strong fundamentals, or a more experienced engineer who prefers hands-on delivery in a small team. We are open to hiring at the level that matches proven capability.
- Backend & AWS Capabilities: C#/.NET experience (commercial or demonstrable projects). Exposure to AWS serverless delivery is helpful, including Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3, and Cognito. Familiarity (or willingness to learn quickly) with infrastructure-as-code via AWS SAM / CloudFormation, and messaging/notifications patterns using SNS and SES, is important.
- Observability: Strong production troubleshooting using CloudWatch Logs/Insights, metrics, and alarms; able to design telemetry that helps others debug.
- Security: Comfortable embedding security practices into delivery (least privilege, secure data handling, auditability); POPIA awareness and disciplined handling of personal data.
- Cognitive Traits:
• High analytical bandwidth for rapid root-cause analysis.
• The ability to apply Probabilistic Thinking to complex, distributed systems.
• A decisive bias for action during high-pressure incidents—the capacity to apply The Stoic Test to operational setbacks and immediately execute solutions.
• The maturity to align with a Superordinate Identity, prioritizing holistic platform health over localized, siloed metrics.
Advantageous
- NET MAUI: Experience shipping and operating MAUI apps (especially those integrating with Cognito/auth and resilient API calling patterns).
- API Contracting: Experience working with OpenAPI specs and partner integration patterns.
- Load & Failure Testing: Evidence of engineering for graceful degradation and realistic failure modes.
- Integrated POS Solutions: Experience in the domain of loyalty and other integrations with in-store and e-commerce Sales solutions provided by major players in the market.
- Payment gateway and processing solutions: Experience in the payment space with the processing and settlement of transactions.
- Loyalty switching and campaign management: Experience on loyalty and campaign management platforms.
- Gamification and AI: Experience in the application of gamification and AI.
- Loyalty & Fintech Domain: Previous experience in loyalty programme platforms, financial technology, or rewards ecosystem engineering.
To Apply
Please submit your CV and a link to your GitHub repository or portfolio to info@pinnaclerewards.co.za.
This role is remunerated above the BCEA earnings threshold. The total cost-to-company package is inclusive of all after-hours requirements associated with this position.
