Objectives

The primary objective is to procure specialised IT resources to facilitate South African Airways' (SAA) migration to a new AWS cloud stack. The engagement aims to establish secure, resilient, and scalable digital platforms that seamlessly integrate customer-facing channels, operational applications, and third-party airline ecosystems while maintaining strict governance, compliance, and production readiness.

Scope

The tender covers three integrated roles spanning architecture, backend engineering, and front-end/mobile development:

• Lead Airline Digital Solutions Architect: Provides principal-level architectural oversight, ensuring technical integrity, design authority, and alignment between business outcomes and platform delivery. Coordinates offshore teams, vendors, and internal stakeholders while overseeing production support and major incident management.
• AWS Cloud-Native Java / EKS Engineer: Designs, develops, deploys, and maintains Java-based microservices, APIs, and integration services on AWS. Manages Kubernetes clusters, CI/CD pipelines, security controls, monitoring, and proactive reliability improvements.
• Senior Mobile and Digital Applications Developer: Builds and supports cross-platform mobile applications (iOS/Android) and responsive web interfaces. Integrates user experiences with SAA APIs and airline business processes, ensuring secure delivery, offline functionality, and smooth release cycles.

Technical Requirements

• Cloud & Containerisation: AWS ecosystem, Amazon EKS, Kubernetes, Docker, container orchestration, networking, load balancing, autoscaling, disaster recovery, and infrastructure governance.
• Integration & APIs: REST and SOAP APIs, middleware, event-driven architectures, caching, messaging queues, and enterprise airline APIs (Amadeus, payment, loyalty, notification, baggage).
• Backend Development: Java, Spring Boot, JPA/Hibernate, relational databases, JSON/XML processing, microservices, and resilient integration patterns (timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, audit logging).
• Frontend & Mobile: React, Next.js, React Native, TypeScript, JavaScript, Liferay/Digital Experience Platforms, responsive design, accessibility standards, and mobile SDKs.
• Security & Operations: Secrets management, encryption, vulnerability remediation, IAM/privilege access control, observability (CloudWatch, logging, alerting), CI/CD automation, static analysis, and root-cause analysis.

Skills Requirements

• Architect: Bachelor’s degree in Engineering/IT or NQF Level 8 equivalent; 10+ years in technology leadership; proven experience in airline digital commerce, passenger services, and technical design authority; strong grasp of airline retailing, non-functional analysis, and vendor/resource management. Agile/Scrum certification is advantageous.
• EKS Engineer: Relevant tertiary qualification or equivalent professional experience; mandatory certification evidence; 5+ years in cloud-native development/operations; high-availability transactional environment experience; expert-level AWS/EKS/Kubernetes proficiency; strong debugging skills for distributed systems and CI/CD pipeline management.
• Mobile Developer: Degree in Engineering/IT or equivalent experience; 5+ years delivering production mobile/responsive applications; mastery of React/React Native, TypeScript, Java/Spring Boot; full lifecycle app store management; experience with secure mobile features (biometrics, push notifications, deep linking); ability to troubleshoot across frontend, mobile, and backend layers.

Explanation of Key Terms

• Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service): A managed AWS service that handles the orchestration, scaling, and security of Kubernetes containers, allowing engineers to focus on application logic rather than cluster maintenance.
• One Order: An IATA industry standard that consolidates all passenger-related data (bookings, tickets, payments, servicing, disruptions) into a single master record, replacing legacy fragmented reservation systems.
• Liferay/DXP: A widely adopted Digital Experience Platform used to author, manage, and deliver personalised web and mobile content across multiple channels.
• Circuit Breaker Pattern: A software design pattern that temporarily halts requests to a failing service, preventing cascading failures and improving system resilience in distributed architectures.
• Deep Links: Specialised URLs that open specific screens or content within a mobile app rather than the home page, enabling precise navigation for tasks like booking confirmation or check-in.