What Is The Role
Elastic, the Search AI company, is looking for a high-energy Enterprise Account Executive to drive net-new revenue and expansion within strategic Enterprise accounts. You’ll be the owner of a defined territory where you’ll build your own pipeline, tell the Elastic Search AI story, and close complex, multi-stakeholder deals in a consumption-based model. This role sits at the intersection of sales execution, technical fluency, and cross-functional collaboration—and is critical to our growth in the Enterprise segment.

What You Will Be Doing

• Own your territory & build pipeline: Develop and execute a proactive outbound cadence (email, call, social) that generates ≥50 % of your booked opportunities.

• Deep discovery & qualification: Uncover pain, business impact, budget, and decision criteria using frameworks like MEDDPICC so you chase only the highest-confidence deals.

• Value storytelling & demos: Craft and deliver tailored narratives and live demos that map Elastic’s Search, Observability, and Security capabilities to measurable business outcomes.

• Mutual deal strategy & forecast accuracy: Collaborate with customers to build formal close plans and keep your CRM up-to-date, maintaining ≥90 % forecast accuracy within ±10 %.

• Executive negotiation & closing: Lead high-stakes contract and pricing discussions—defend your value, structure give/get trades, and land multi-year consumption commitments.

• Domain & cloud acumen: Position Elastic as the Search AI platform of choice by speaking fluently about cloud economics, usage-based pricing, and modern data architectures.

• Cross-functional partnership: Work hand-in-glove with Solutions Architects, Customer Success, Marketing, and RevOps to accelerate deals and drive exceptional customer outcomes.

What You Bring

• Proven SaaS quota‐carrying success: 5+ years closing complex Enterprise deals, consistently overachieving targets in a consumption-based or usage-model environment.

• Expert discovery & qualification skills: Demonstrated ability to apply MEDDPICC or equivalent frameworks to drive disciplined pipeline and eliminate low-probability deals.

• Compelling value storytellers: Track record of delivering executive-level presentations and demos that tie product capabilities to real dollars saved, revenue gained, or risk mitigated.

• Strong negotiation chops: History of landing multi-year, high-ACV contracts while protecting margin and securing executive stakeholder buy-in.

• Technical & cloud fluency: Comfortable discussing a broad range of technical topics including observability, security, vector/traditional search, and cloud cost optimization.

• Collaborative mindset & coachability: A learner who partners effectively with internal teams, incorporates feedback, and embodies Elastic’s values of community and openness.

• Open Source enthusiasm: Genuine appreciation for open-source communities and the Elastic model—bonus if you’ve sold or advocated in an OSS context.

Bonus Points

• Prior experience at an open-source or developer‐centric infrastructure company.

• Familiarity with observability (logs, metrics, traces) or security analytics (SIEM/XDR) use cases.

If you’re driven to build your own pipeline, master complex deal cycles, and help customers unlock the power of Search AI, we’d love to talk. Apply today!

***NB - Individual must be based in the Johannesburg/Pretoria region***

#LI-PM1

Takealot.com, South Africa’s leading online retailer, is looking for a highly talented Software Engineer (Search) to join our team. We are a young, dynamic, hyper-growth company looking for smart, creative, hard-working people with integrity to join us!

Think you’ve been challenged before? Think again!

• Scale: Over 4 million happy shoppers shop online on takealot.com. Show them what you can do.
• Learn: We work with the best of the best. Code alongside industry leaders and up-skill in record time.
• Grow: Expand your career in the fast-growing Takealot Group: takealot.com, and Mr D. We like to promote from within: Here’s your chance.

Who’s who in the tech space

This position reports to the respective team's manager.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

As a Software Engineer, you will be someone whose expertise directly translates into developing robust software in the e-commerce domain. You will have the opportunity to implement best practices to improve existing software and participate in the development of new features. While we don't promote after-hours work as part of the regular workday, we run a 24/7 business with the need to keep systems up and running. Software Engineers are expected to provide after-hours support on a rotational basis to resolve critical system issues if needed.

The role is focused on maintaining our search stack. We are currently in the process of transitioning from Elasticsearch to Vertex AI Search, so experience with any of those would be a bonus, but not a necessity. Experience with any kind of search technology (Solr, Algolia) is relevant. Takealot runs mostly on Python, but experience in any of the mainstream backend languages (Python, Java or Go) is a plus.

• Design and build solutions to assist our business users and improve customer experience
• Architect and design solutions with your team
• Develop code, making major improvements to non-functional areas
• Develop high-quality production code for work of high complexity and scale
• Utilize and improve functional and non-functional testing practices
• Champion, challenge, and iterate on best practices within engineering
• Design solutions for complex problems with difficult decision trade-offs, typically system or domain-wide
• Participate in and collaborate on architecture proposals across engineering
• Support alignment of architecture across the organisation
• Respond to and resolve bugs in production for systems in your division
• Respond to alerts and support incident response within your division
• Investigate and drive the resolution of issues that impact multiple teams
• Support, challenge existing, and define new engineering processes and directives
• Review and contribute fixes and content to internal documentation
• React to technology trends, identifying risks and opportunities for your division's technologies, systems, and domains
• Share knowledge through blog posts, tech talks, and workshops across engineering
• Contribute to discussions and decisions in the division
• Challenge others to always produce work of the highest quality
• REST and RPC API implementation and maintenance (using Python)
• Develop and maintain automation tests
• Liaise with various internal stakeholders to discuss project requirements, progress, etc.

The skills we need:

• Solutions-oriented, can-do attitude, and high energy
• Strong analytical and critical thinking, using data to inform decisions
• Ability to dis-aggregate and structure solutions to ambiguous problems
• Solid quantitative skills
• Capability to present ideas succinctly, in writing and verbally
• Versatile and with the appetite to learn by doing

Qualifications & Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree or an Advanced Diploma in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent practical experience).
• 5 to 10 years in a software development role
• Experience with search technologies (Elasticsearch, Vertex AI Search, Solr, Algolia, or any other major third party provider)
• A thorough understanding of computer science fundamentals, including object-oriented design, data structures, and algorithms
• Experience in writing robust, efficient production code
• Proficient in a strongly typed open source language such as Python, Java, Golang, etc
• Exposure to RESTful APIs and web services.
• Experience with SQL database systems
• Experience with development in a Linux environment

Experience in the following will be advantageous:

• Familiarity with microservices architecture 
• Experience working in an Agile environment 
• MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL
• Memcached, Redis
• Message Brokers, Queues, and PubSub systems (e.g., Kafka and RabbitMQ)
• Containerisation (e.g., Docker)
• Orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes)
• GitHub, Travis CI, Jenkins
• AWS, GCP, Azure
• JavaScript, React, jQuery

Let’s talk about life @ Takealot Group

• The power is in your hands: We offer a market-related Total Remuneration Package that allows full flexibility according to your needs. Go on, be the master of your own destiny.
• No doors: We aren’t fans of stuffy offices or siloed work environments. See someone you like, high-five, collab, and make something great.
• Remote working: Enjoy the flexibility of working from home while having the option for in-office interactions. Takealot.com provides a fully remote setup with the choice to visit the office to relish in those water cooler moments when desired.
• Mentorship programme: We aren’t kidding when we say the people with the best people win. Now’s your chance to be one of the best by learning from the best.
• Naspers Tech Community & Online Learning: Share ideas and grow with global industry leaders who are all just a Slack message away. Love to learn? Up-skill with free access to courses on MyAcademy, Udacity, Coursera, and more.
• Good times: Get to know the other extraordinary minds at takealot.com during regular social events and out-of-office activities (think hikes, think mini golf, think good times).
• Staff discount: Takealotmore subscriptions and millions of products across 28 departments. What more could you ask for?
• Birthday leave: Cake Day all the way. Enjoy your day off - you deserve it.
• Right tools, right job: Mac or Linux, two monitors or one. Whatever your preference, you’ll work on the latest tech, off the latest tech.
• Help when you need it most: Confidential counselling, legal support, and financial guidance, anytime, anywhere.
• Tech stack (for days): ReactJS, Python, Scala, Kotlin, Swift, Google Cloud, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes, and all things machine learning. If you build it, they will come.
• Free parking: No more 5km fun runs to your desk (unless you want to).

Like what you see?

If you meet the above, you are an Extraordinary Mind. Apply today!!

Takealot Group is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Applicants from previously disadvantaged groups and people with disabilities will be given preference.