Fresh Jobs at Allan Gray Proprietary Limited

Job Description

We are looking for a dynamic individual who has experience managing teams and working with various stakeholders. The ideal candidate for this position is detail-oriented, highly analytical and has relevant IT project management or product owner experience. The successful incumbent will be responsible for managing and mentoring the team. The role also entails the ownership of the backlog and working with stakeholders to ensure the backlog consists of items that would add value in relation to our objectives and strategic initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Manage and mentor direct reports
• Manage and control what is added to the production environment
• Engage with business stakeholders on what system enhancements are required to support their needs
• Challenge stakeholders on their assumptions of how they envision business and system processes to work
• Guide and document detailed requirements
• Based on business priority, prioritise / plan the associated work and assess scope of projects
• Manage team roadmap and communicate this roadmap with the team
• Communicate with stakeholders on team progress and provide enough information to allow for informed business decisions
• Critically evaluate information gathered from multiple stakeholders and resolve conflicts
• Assist in enforcement of project deadlines, schedules and methodologies
• Support and drive implementation of projects
• Support the documentation and planning for test scenarios, test cases and testing activities necessary to assess the quality and completion of system implementations
• Manage the team and assist in resolving conflicts or making trade-offs
• Work with tech lead to establish a healthy balance between business backlog, QA backlog and the technical backlog.

Qualifications

• Technology or Business Analyst qualification
• Strong academic performance


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Skills / Competencies & Experience

• Experience working in financial services
• Previous experience as a Business Analyst would be advantageous
• Experience leading software development teams and managing complex software projects
• Experience with stakeholder management
• Data analysis and SQL skills
• Experience in data warehousing and data visualisation tools would be advantageous
• Good understanding and experience following agile release processes
• At least 2 years people management experience
• Attention to detail and problem-solving skills
• Methodical approach to work
• Ability to multi-task across different projects
• Good verbal, written and interpersonal communication skills
• Planning, organizational and time management skills

Closing date: 15/05.2020

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Job Description

At Allan Gray we believe in building software that will shape the future and we are looking for testers with passion, drive, strong technical and problem solving skills to help us achieve this goal. We believe our testers play a vital role not just in ensuring the quality of the software we develop, but in making it better, all the way from backend to frontend. As a tester at Allan Gray you play a critical role in the design of our software to ensure it is developed with quality in mind from the very beginning and solving the many complex challenges along the way, using some of the industry’s latest technologies. Automation is a key part in what we do, so we will expect our testers to have a strong coding background to assist in building the automation systems that enable us to deliver this world class software rapidly.

Job Summary

• Estimating effort for testing tasks
• Defining the test approach for each sprint
• Extracting test requirements for user stories
• Designing and creating test cases
• Executing test cases manually / automated
• Manual front end functional testing of applications – which includes system, integration, regression and end to end testing as well as exploratory testing
• Collaborate closely with developers, identifying, logging, prioritizing and verifying defects in a defect tracking system
• Managing and maintaining the test environments and test data
• Implementing automated tests
• Develop test tools, and extend test frameworks and test environments
• First line support and root cause analysis of production issues and proactive, friendly, transparent and efficient support service
• Playing a central role in establishing best practices for testing in an agile environment
• Continuous improvement initiatives specifically with regard to quality
• Product risk mitigation thereby limiting defects in production
• Project risk mitigation thereby ensuring a smooth deployment process
• Managing and maintaining the regression test suits (manual / automated)
• Carry out exploratory testing
• Final sign-off of new releases

Education

• Degree in computer science or business information systems ideal, but solid experience will be considered as well

Competencies

• You understand the systems you are testing.
• You can program (we use Scala, JavaScript and UFT amongst others) or are interested in learning to program.
• You know how to write SQL.
• You know where it is most effective for an automated test to live. (Unit, Integration, E2E)
• You can speak the same language as the developers.
• You understand the benefits of manual testing but also the costs.
• You are continually trying to improve your testing skills.
• You read widely about what is happening in the world of testing.
• You know that learning didn't end with the last course you did but rather its continuous for the rest of your life.
• You care about releasing great software.
• You have experience testing financial applications.
• You enjoy complicated numerical calculations.
• You will need to help solve the complex testing issues we face.
• You will need to help solve the small testing issues we face.
• You will need to deal with a wide range of people often under severe stress


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Closing Date :31/05/2020

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Job Description

Allan Gray is looking for a Solution Delivery Manager / Domain Owner to lead the Fund Operations domain to deliver world-class solutions for the Fund Operations area within the Asset Management business. As a Solutions Delivery Manager / Domain Owner you will manage the domain and systems used within the Fund Operations area; be responsible for understanding the business direction of the Fund Operations business area and drive solution delivery to achieve this. At Allan Gray, we are constantly looking for better ways of doing things, so if you can bring a willingness and excitement to find innovative solutions and assist the domains with the delivery of solutions in a performance-driven environment, then we may just be perfect for you.

Responsibilities

• Overall co-ordination and running of the Fund Operations domain
• Understand the business objectives and priorities of the Fund Operations business area
• Prioritisation of requirements for the domain that are aligned to the business objectives. Manage competing priorities for delivery items, across backlog and production support items
• Responsible for ensuring business requirements are accurately solicited and agreed
• New product development, working with stakeholders to ensure systems impacts and requirements are identified
• Actively engaging the business on testing new business processes before they need to be done in production
• Identify opportunities or areas of improvement not only in the system but also giving input into process improvements
• Communication of priorities and progress of delivery to key stakeholders
• Line management of the BA’s in the team and their delivery
• Ensuring the correct skills in place in the domain to meet the business needs
• Engage with other Domain Owners to deliver end-to-end solutions for the Institutional business
• Ensure an effectively delivery life cycle process is followed within the domain
• Ensure the domain strives to achieve the highest standards of quality, productivity and continuous improvement of their systems
• Identify and manage any risk introduced by changes
• Ensure that production support is effectively and timeously addressed
• Review and drive the resolution of the analysis and testing root cause analysis and preventative actions
• Vendor management

Skills / Competencies

• Knowledgeable of asset management and IT industry changes, practices and software offerings
• Understanding of Fund Accounting
• Experience in solution analysis and driving, managing systems delivery
• Knowledge of how technology can improve or change business performance
• Drives continues process improvement
• Strong leadership skills
• Understands risk associated with system change and IT governance
• Ability to engage with key stakeholders within Allan Gray and external
• Understand agile methodologies and work practices
• Good communication and interpersonal skills
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills

Experience

• Experience with managing an IT team and driving team delivery
• Understanding of the Fund Operations business and systems
• Min 6 years’ experience as a senior business analyst or an equivalent senior role
• Excellent track record of managing and implementation of IT solutions
• Exposure to the IT delivery life cycle
• Strong project management
• Record of leadership

Qualifications

• Computer Science Degree or similar

Closing Date:15/05/2020

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Job Description

This is an opportunity to work in a large IT department with about 20 teams.
You'll be surrounded by people who are incredibly smart, passionate about creating long term wealth to our clients, and believe that world class service is critical to customer success.
We appreciate someone that is pragmatic and knows when to push for process improvement or let the team experiment and fail in a safe manner. Many of our teams have been doing Scrum or Kanban, some have even chosen parts of Agile processes that work for them, it is not one size fits all. The candidate should be able to engage with teams to either re-establish Scrum practises or assist them in Process design to achieve buy-in and help the team be effective.
This problem-space is particularly interesting, and the teams the SM will engage with, require us to build systems which are highly integrated. There will be opportunity to help the team simplify their dependencies and introduce the team to modern engineering practises to help achieve their goals.
The candidate will be highly autonomous and will need to engage with not just the team, but stakeholders outside the team to achieve continuous improvement.

You will not be alone, we currently have a group of Scrum Masters that you can co-facilitate, co-coach, pair on anything to help achieve a team’s goals.
We believe Scrum Masters can influence broader than one or two teams and we encourage implementation of improvement themes across the department.

Responsibilities

• Organise and help execute the Scrum framework: Scrum meetings (i.e. daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, retrospectives, planning sessions) and metrics (burndown charts, predictability metrics)
• Assist the product owner in prioritisation and scheduling of work, to meet agreed delivery time frames
• Make sure that all the team members understand their roles and fulfil them to the best of their ability
• Guide/coach/mentor the development team to take on the responsibilities of the process and the ownership of the product - lead team to a self-organised state
• Identify and facilitate the resolution of identified impediments
• Helps the team in its use of Scrum and Agile practices by motivating the team and reminding the team of its goals and how they choose to meet them

Skills / Competencies

• Strong communication, coaching and facilitation skills
• Flexible, resilient, energetic and have an adaptive leadership style
• Influential. Able to exert influence without authority inside and outside the team
• Strong logical thinking and deductive reasoning
• Strong negotiation and conflict resolution skills
• Self-motivated and the ability to motivate others
• Excellent interpersonal skills, ability to work with diverse personality types and deal with conflict in an effective way.
• Collaborative. Works to ensure a collaborative culture exists within the team
• Highly observant and an expert at root cause analysis
• Committed and responsible: Take responsibility without assuming any authority that might be useful in achieving it.
• Humble and lead through Servant Leadership. Recognize the value in all team members and by example lead others to the same opinion

Experience

• Understanding Engineering practises and can coach teams in their use… is advantageous
• Experience in dealing with all levels of business essential

Qualifications

• Tertiary qualification - Advantageous
• At least 5+ years’ IT industry experience essential
• 3-4 years’ experience within an agile development environment as a Scrum Master; advantageous

 

Closing Date:15/05/2020

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Job Description

Allan Gray is looking for an innovative Software Development Manager to lead and assist the developers in building world-class solutions for the Asset Management business. As Software Development Manager, you will drive software delivery projects across multiple teams and provide expertise and guidance to the various functional roles across the full value chain of Software Development.

Our application development stack consists of ReactJs applications interacting with .NET Core APIs, deployed on an elastic containerized infrastructure supported and managed on premises through Kubernetes. As a team, we apply best practices in user experience, DevOps, web application architecture, solution design and testing.

Our data is stored in on-premise SQL Server databases, providing the foundation for both the applications and reporting capabilities in the business.

In addition to rolling out new and enhanced application functionality, a major focus in the area for the medium term is to improve our data flows and transition to a new Data Warehouse.
At Allan Gray, we are constantly looking for better ways of doing things. If you have a willingness and excitement to find innovative solutions and assist the teams with the delivery of complex software projects, in a performance-driven environment that will also allow you to play with a comprehensive tech stack, then we may be perfect for you.

Responsibilities
People Management

• Management of software developers (via Tech Leads) within Institutional IT across multiple teams
• Understand the development skills/capacity (planning) needed and work to put this in place
• Involvement in the recruitment of developers, including placement of graduates
• Onboarding new employees both experienced and at graduate level
• People development through coaching, mentoring and driving activities focused on developer skills upliftment
• Involvement in Design and Development of Solutions
• Drive delivery of the developers across the teams
• Provide expertise and guidance to the various functional roles across the full value chain of Software Development – Architecture, Requirements, Design, Implementation, Testing, Deployment, Maintenance
• Input into larger/complex development items
• Support the implementation of architecture and coding standards across teams
• Understand the (resolve) key system issues being experienced across all systems
• Collaborating with key people within the IT and business teams, Domain Owners, Architects and business stakeholders
   

Governance; Risk Management and Process Improvement

• Ensure good governance in place for release management process and drive improvements/automation
• Maintain a release management process across all systems that meets external and internal audit requirements
• Managing internal and external audit reviews
• Understand key risks in Institutional IT and implement controls/processes/capacity to address these risks

Requirements

• Previous experience leading multiple software development teams
• Line management experience for a period of 5 years or more
• Experience as a software developer for more than 8 years on an equivalent tech stack
• Expert knowledge of professional software engineering practices for the full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes and testing
• Ability to deal with senior stakeholders
• Excellent track record of managing and implementation of tech solutions
• Asset management business experience an advantage
• Good interpersonal and communication skills
• Strong organisational and planning skills

Technical Requirements

• Experience in systems design and coding in Microsoft .NET, C#, C++ or JavaScript
• Experience in writing SQL for Microsoft SQL server, including stored procedures, UDF’s and other T-SQL Querying
• Experience in system integration, distributed computing and building enterprise-wide systems
• Experience with data integration, validation and reconciliation (SSIS or similar).
• Experience with reporting technologies (SSRS)
• Experience in analysing data and performing complex data manipulation using Microsoft SQL
• Experience in design and implement relational and dimensional database structures
• Experience with creating and maintaining cubes (SSAS)

Education

• Computer Science Degree preferred

Closing date: 30/05/2020

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Job Description
Allan Gray is looking for a dynamic Technical Lead who will play a key part in leading one of our development teams in Johannesburg. As this is a hands-on role, you will also be involved in adding and maintaining features to our world-class software and be involved in all facets of the software development process.

You will liaise with other Senior IT Members in Cape Town and make sure that the technical vision of the company is translated and preserved. Part of this includes performing management duties such as career guidance and performance appraisals.
As Technical Lead you will ensure the design of clear and simple solutions and that elegant robust code is written as well as provide guidance in troubleshooting and root cause analysis.
We have adopted a Microservices architecture with RESTful API’s predominantly written in Scala, with many built in Go. Our Microservices are built and deployed on an elastic containerized infrastructure supported and managed on premises through Kubernetes. As a team, we apply best practises in user experience, DevOps, web application architecture, solution design, scaling and testing

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of developers
• Liaise with senior IT members in Cape Town and build software and processes accordingly
• Perform managerial tasks such as: career guidance, performance appraisals etc.
• Design clean and simple solutions
• Ensure that elegant robust code is written
• Improve and optimize the performance of existing systems
• Provide guidance in troubleshooting root-cause errors
• Ensure that unit, integration and acceptance tests for all components are written
• Ensure that build automation scripts are written
• Assist with analysis where required

Requirements

• At least 8 years’ worth of professional development experience
• Experience leading other software developers
• Line management
• Strong software design skills
• Strong understanding of software development process.
• Proficiency in a modern programming language (Scala or Golang preferred but not required)
• Experience in system integration, distributed computing and building enterprise-wide systems
• Knowledge of professional software engineering practices for the full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes and testing

Education

• Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Science or related discipline

Closing Date:30/05/2020