About OneDayOnly

OneDayOnly.co.za is a fast-paced, high-volume e-commerce business at the forefront of daily deals and flash sales in South Africa. We delight millions of customers with compelling offers, and we're now entering an era of scaled innovation. This role is critical to unlocking the next wave of customer experience, data sophistication, and platform growth.

CTO Vision

After 15 years of strong growth, we’re at a pivotal moment. Our business was built on grit, sharp execution, and home-grown systems—but the next chapter demands more. As our roadmap grows more complex and our ambitions more bold, we’re looking for a CTO who can help us scale into the future.

We need a system strategist who can assess our legacy tech, lead us toward a modern, AI-first architecture, and build the structures, tools, and teams that power innovation. A leader who thrives at the intersection of “code” and “commerce,” who can drive speed, resilience, and growth, and who plays a strategic role across the entire business—not just tech.

We’ve built something special—a uniquely South African platform that created its own market for deal-based savings. We have a fantastic development team who continue to achieve great things. But the space is shifting. New players are entering with agility, playfulness, and scale. To stay ahead, we need to evolve faster, think bolder, and lead smarter. This role isn’t only about keeping things running — it’s about reimagining what comes next.

Who you are

We're seeking a visionary, hands-on CTO who will architect our future. This is not a maintenance role - this is for someone who thinks like a founder, codes like a craftsman, and builds like a systems engineer. Your job is to define and deliver a technology strategy that sets our e-commerce business up for a decade of scale, speed, and intelligence.

You're a builder, strategist, and coach. You think in systems. You thrive under pressure and are as comfortable debugging an issue as you are whiteboarding the next 12-60 month tech roadmap. You're ready to make a measurable impact and love driving innovation, speed, and reliability through technology.

• A strategic thinker with deep technical expertise and strong commercial acumen.
• Comfortable operating across board-level strategy and hands-on technical leadership.
• Driven by innovation, optimisation, and creating measurable business impact.
• Adept at building and mentoring high-performing, multidisciplinary teams.
• Excited by scale, complexity, and transformation in a fast-moving e-commerce environment.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the long-term technical strategy and system architecture.
• Rebuild or replatform legacy systems into scalable, modular, API-first architectures.
• Lead front-end, back-end, and data platform direction with modern stacks and tooling.
• Partner with the Directors and potentially serve on the board as a technology advisor and visionary.
• Mentor the Head of Development and establish clear development processes, engineering culture, and performance expectations.
• Drive innovation — from AI personalisation to big data platforms — to serve customer experience and business insights.
• Make build vs buy vs partner decisions with commercial ROI in mind.

What You’ll Do

Technology & Platform Strategy

• Define and execute a modern, AI-first technical strategy that scales with growth and enhances the customer experience.
• Assess and re-architect systems for modular, API-first scalability while managing risk and technical debt.
• Lead front-end, back-end, data, and DevOps teams—ensuring performance, security, and rapid iteration.
  

Customer & Commerce Experience

• Set the strategic direction for all user-facing systems, ensuring a fast, beautiful, and consistent UI across mobile and desktop.
• Drive UX/UI initiatives and align with product and design teams.
• Implement features like intelligent search, recommendation engines, and personalisation.
• Champion a culture of experimentation (A/B testing, conversion funnel optimisation).

Infrastructure, Security & Scalability

• Architect scalable, secure back-end services for high transaction volumes.
• Oversee all cloud, server, and deployment strategies for performance and reliability.
• Lead DevOps best practices to enable rapid deployment and rollback.
• Integrate robust fintech and third-party systems including ERP, WMS, CRM, and payment platforms.

Data & AI

• Define the company’s data strategy—from pipelines to dashboards to real-time insights.
• Guide predictive modelling, AI-driven personalisation, and forecasting initiatives.
• Empower all teams with self-serve analytics and foster data literacy organisation-wide.

Core Competencies & Skills

Key SKills

• Architectural knowledge across modern cloud platforms, microservices, containerisation, and event-driven systems.
• Deep understanding of large-scale e-commerce platforms (multi-tenant, multi-country, high concurrency).
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional initiatives with product, marketing, finance and ops.
• Hands-on coding ability — still writes and reviews code in modern frameworks.
• Business-minded: Thinks in cost-to-scale, margin impact, data ROI.
• Inspires technical teams, earns the respect of senior developers.

Technical Skills

• Front-End: React, ReactNative
• Back-End: PHP, Laravel, Next JS, NodeJS
• Infrastructure: AWS/GCP/Azure
• Architecture: MySQL, Redis, CloudFlare
• DevOps: Azure Devops, BitBucket, GitHub, CI Pipelines

Data & Reporting

• BigQuery, Snowflake, MySQL
• BI tools (PowerBI, Tableau)
• Analytics tools (GA4, Firebase)

Leadership & Strategy

• Proven leadership of technical teams (engineering, DevOps, data)
• Strategic alignment of tech to commercial OKRs
• Board-level communication and planning
• Deep experience in platform innovation and AI integration

Requirements

• BSc/MSc in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field
• 10+ years of technical experience, with 5+ years at senior leadership level
• Proven track record scaling high-traffic e-commerce or tech platforms
• Knowledge of the South African market is preferred but not essential

What Success Looks Like

• Secure, scalable systems with 99.95% uptime and rapid feature delivery
• Real-time, actionable insights across business units
• Clear alignment between tech roadmaps and company strategy
• A high-performance engineering culture built on speed, learning, and excellence