AWS DevOps / Platform Engineering Lead – Johannesburg.
This is not a DevOps role where you sit on the sidelines reviewing architecture diagrams. You’ll be leading the AWS DevOps and platform engineering capability while staying firmly hands-on.
Around half your time will be spent in engineering delivery across AWS environments, migrations, modernisation projects and managed services.
The other half will focus on leading and developing the DevOps team, owning delivery standards, supporting customers and making sure the work gets done properly.
You’ll be responsible for the technical direction of the team, but you’ll still be expected to design solutions, review code, solve complex production issues and step into high-pressure incidents when needed.
The environment suits someone who enjoys both the technical and leadership sides of the job and does not want to choose between the two.
Core tech: AWS, Terraform, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, EKS, Docker, Helm, GitHub Actions, GitLab, Linux, Python/Bash, CloudWatch and CloudTrail.
Salary: Up to R150k CTC per month.
Duties and Responsibilities
- Lead and develop the DevOps engineering team, including hiring, onboarding, performance management and day-to-day work allocation.
- Mentor engineers through technical reviews, code reviews, pairing and structured development plans.
- Build capability within the team and create clear AWS certification and career development pathways.
- Own the technical delivery of DevOps workstreams across customer projects.
- Produce realistic technical estimates and ensure delivery remains within agreed scope and effort.
- Lead the design and implementation of secure, scalable AWS architectures.
- Define DevOps, Infrastructure-as-Code and CI/CD standards across projects.
- Design AWS landing zones and multi-account environments using AWS Organizations and Control Tower.
- Lead Terraform architecture, reusable module design and automation standards.
- Design and manage container platforms using Kubernetes, Amazon EKS and ECS.
- Build and maintain containerised workloads using Docker and Helm.
- Design CI/CD and GitOps pipelines using tools such as GitHub Actions and GitLab.
- Implement monitoring, logging, alerting and observability across production environments.
- Design backup and disaster recovery solutions, including RTO, RPO and DR testing.
- Support AWS migrations and application modernisation projects.
- Ensure AWS environments align with Well-Architected principles.
- Implement and maintain AWS security controls across IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, GuardDuty, Security Hub and related services.
- Embed security into CI/CD pipelines through policy-as-code, infrastructure scanning and secrets scanning.
- Support environments operating under compliance requirements such as POPIA, GDPR, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, NIST and HIPAA.
- Act as the escalation point for complex AWS production issues.
- Lead P1 and P2 incident response, root cause analysis and post-incident reviews.
- Establish and manage on-call and support rotations to ensure SLA commitments are met.
- Advise customers on AWS optimisation, resilience, reliability and cost reduction.
- Participate in architecture workshops and technical discovery sessions with customers.
- Produce technical designs, estimates, proposals and input into Statements of Work.
- Communicate technical risks, decisions and delivery status clearly to customers and internal stakeholders.
- Work closely with Delivery, Presales, Managed Services, Security and FinOps teams.
- Build reusable delivery assets including Terraform modules, pipeline templates, SOPs and runbooks.
- Track and improve engineering delivery metrics including deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate and mean time to recovery.
Requirements
- You’ll need strong technical depth, but this role also requires proven experience leading people and owning delivery.
- Essential
- 7+ years’ experience across infrastructure, cloud or DevOps.
- At least 4+ years of substantial hands‑on AWS experience.
- At least 2+ years’ experience leading or managing engineers.
- Proven experience with hiring, performance management, mentoring and work allocation.
- Strong hands‑on AWS experience across:
- IAM
- VPC and networking
- EC2
- S3
- RDS / Aurora
- AWS Organizations
- AWS security principles
- Strong Infrastructure-as-Code experience using Terraform and AWS CloudFormation.
- Solid experience with Terraform module design and state management.
- Strong Docker and Kubernetes experience.
- Production experience with Amazon EKS.
- Good understanding of Kubernetes pods, deployments, services and Helm.
- Strong CI/CD and Git-based workflow experience.
- Experience with CloudWatch and CloudTrail.
- Strong Linux experience.
- Scripting experience using Python and/or Bash.
- Proven customer‑facing technical delivery experience within a consulting, AWS partner or managed services environment.
- Experience managing production incidents and on‑call support against contracted SLAs.
- AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional or AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, or the ability to achieve one within six months of joining.
- Advantageous:
- Amazon ECS experience.
- AWS Control Tower and landing zone experience.
- AWS Security – Specialty or Advanced Networking – Specialty certification.
- Pulumi experience.
- HashiCorp Terraform Associate, CKA or CKAD certification.
- Experience with policy‑as‑code and IaC security scanning tools such as Checkov, tfsec or OPA.
- Backup and disaster recovery design experience.
- FinOps and AWS cost optimisation experience.
- Exposure to AI/ML workloads such as Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker or MLOps environments.
- Experience working in regulated sectors such as financial services, healthcare, higher education or public sector.
- ITIL 4 Foundation.
- BSc in Information Technology, Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
The Person
- You’ll suit this role if you are comfortable switching between technical delivery, team leadership and customer conversations without losing momentum.
- You lead from the front, remain calm when production is under pressure and take ownership when things go wrong.
- You care about engineering quality, security and documentation, but you also understand that delivery needs to make commercial sense.
- Most importantly, you’re still technically curious and hands‑on.