Senior Platform Engineer (Developer Experience)
Software Engineering
Cape Town, South Africa
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 the Lead Developer Experience Engineer, you'll be the technical anchor for our Internal Developer Portal - the platform that 600+ engineers rely on every day to discover capabilities, scaffold new services, and adopt platform best practices. Right now, this is the highest-leverage investment our Cloud Platform Engineering team can make. You won't just build a portal, you'll shape how developers work across the entire organisation, turning complex platform capabilities into an intuitive, self-service experience. This role is for someone who thinks deeply about user experience, can bridge frontend and infrastructure engineering, and wants to have a real impact on how a scaling engineering org works.
What You'll Do:
- Lead day-to-day development of the Internal Developer Portal: feature delivery, plugin development, catalogue design, and integration with platform APIs. You'll ship code, not just plan it.
- Build and maintain plugins that surface platform capabilities - infrastructure-as-code modules, CI/CD pipelines, shared services, observability dashboards, SLO definitions - as discoverable, self-service catalogue entries.
- Own the portal's component model: how services, APIs, resources, permissions, systems and golden paths are represented, related and presented to developers.
- Collaborate with Cloud Platform Engineering teams and product engineering to design and build self-service facilities that take developers from 'I need a new service' to a deployed, observable, SLO-defined service without manual work.
- Anchor the technical standards for the DX & Portals team: code review quality bar, plugin development patterns, frontend testing, accessibility and portal performance. Mentor DX Engineers joining the team and provide technical guidance on architecture and decision-making.
- Listen to developer feedback through surveys and conversations, continuously improve the portal and drive adoption of platform standards. Work with the Director to prioritise features and eliminate friction.
What You Bring:
- Software engineering experience, including developing and deploying high-availability services to production.
- Strong experience with a modern frontend framework (React, Vue.js, or equivalent) and solid understanding of backend service patterns, ideally including Java.
- Familiarity with cloud-centric tooling: infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or equivalent), Kubernetes, and cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, or Azure).
- A product-thinking mindset: you design around user needs, treat platforms as products, and focus on adoption and feedback loops.
- Experience mentoring and leading engineers; you can set a technical quality bar and help others grow.
- Strong technical writing and communication skills. You can explain complex systems clearly and document decisions so others understand the reasoning.
- A Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related field, or equivalent professional experience.
- Experience building or contributing to developer platforms, Internal Developer Portals, or other internal tooling at scale (preferred)
- Exposure to platform engineering concepts: CI/CD, observability, SRE practices, and golden paths (preferred)
- Experience working with SaaS platforms for building developer portals or similar configuration-driven tools (preferred)
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.
