Job Description

The Capability Head is accountable for defining, leading, and maturing FNB’s enterprise‑wide capability for data pipelines, API engineering, and intelligent digitisation. The role ensures the organisation builds scalable data movement pathways, a robust and modern API ecosystem, and AI‑enabled digitisation solutions that convert unstructured inputs (e.g., images, documents) into trusted, actionable data.
This capability underpins improved customer experience, operational efficiency, risk reduction, and advanced decision‑making across the bank.

Key Accountabilities

Capability Leadership & Strategy

• Own and drive the strategy for Data Pipelines, API Engineering and Intelligent Digitisation across FNB.
• Develop and maintain an enterprise capability roadmap aligned to business strategy, architectural standards, and regulatory requirements.
• Provide leadership, coaching and technical direction to squads delivering on the capability.​

Data Pipeline Engineering & Governance

• Oversee the design, build, and operation of automated, scalable data pipelines across cloud and on‑prem environments.
• Ensure adherence to data quality, lineage, cataloguing, governance, and POPIA compliance requirements.
• Drive adoption of streaming, near‑real‑time, and batch processing using modern data engineering tools and patterns.

Enterprise API Management & Integration

• Own the API capability, including standards, governance, frameworks, and best‑practice design patterns.
• Ensure development of secure, reusable, well‑documented APIs that enable ecosystem growth, business integration, and customer digital journeys.
• Champion API lifecycle management, API portal adoption, testing frameworks, and monitoring practices.

Intelligent Digitisation (Image‑to‑Data + AI‑Driven Automation)

• Lead the design and deployment of OCR, computer vision, LLMs, and intelligent agent‑based platforms that extract structured data from documents such as:
  • payslips
  • ID documents
  • bank statements
  • proof of address
  • handwritten or semi‑structured forms
• Ensure high model accuracy through feedback loops, monitoring, and continuous improvement.
• Drive responsible AI practices and secure handling of sensitive documents.

Technical Excellence & Delivery Enablement

• Set and enforce best‑practice engineering standards including cloud engineering, CI/CD, DevOps, MLOps, and automated testing.
• Partner with architecture to align capability with FNB’s future‑fit technology stack.
• Support squads through backlog prioritisation, solution design and capability uplift.

Stakeholder Engagement & Influence

• Engage and influence Business, Risk, Compliance, Architecture, Digital Platforms and other enterprise stakeholders.
• Communicate capability value, adoption levels and performance outcomes to senior leadership.
• Drive enablement, training, and adoption across consumers of the capability.

Risk, Security & Compliance

• Ensure compliance with POPIA, information security standards, audit requirements, and responsible AI principles.
• Implement secure data movement practices, encryption, IAM policies, and proactive risk mitigation.

Skills & Competencies

Technical

• Expertise in large‑scale data engineering: Spark, Kafka, Airflow, Databricks, Azure Data Factory.
• Strong knowledge of API standards and technologies (REST, GraphQL, gRPC).
• Familiarity with API management platforms (Apigee, AWS API Gateway, Kong, etc.).
• Experience with OCR, computer vision, ML models, LLMs and intelligent agents.
• Cloud engineering (Azure/AWS/GCP), Kubernetes, Docker.
• Strong grounding in DevOps/MLOps and automated pipelines.
• Proficient in SQL and NoSQL data stores.

Professional

• Strategic thinking and ability to define and evolve enterprise capabilities.
• Strong stakeholder management, communication and change‑leadership skills.
• Ability to simplify technical complexity into business‑relevant insights.
• Demonstrated success leading multidisciplinary engineering teams.

Qualifications & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems or related field.
• 6–10+ years’ experience in data engineering, API engineering or intelligent automation.
• Proven experience in AI‑driven document extraction (OCR + ML/LLM).
• Prior leadership in a Capability Owner, Product Owner, or Engineering Lead role.
• Banking/financial services experience advantageous.

Important Closing Date Note

Take note that applications will not be accepted on the below date and onwards, kindly submit applications ahead of the closing date indicated below.

08/04/26

All appointments will be made in line with FirstRand Group’s Employment Equity plan. The Bank supports the recruitment and advancement of individuals with disabilities. In order for us to fulfill this purpose, candidates can disclose their disability information on a voluntary basis. The Bank will keep this information confidential unless we are required by law to disclose this information to other parties.