Head of Platform Engineering (Johannesburg)

We’re hiring a Head of Platform Engineering to take full ownership of our infrastructure and scale it for the next phase of growth.

This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who thrives in building, not inheriting — you’ll define the architecture, set the standards, and lead a high-performing team from the ground up. You’ll work closely with the CTO to shape both the platform and the team, with AI-assisted engineering at the core of how we operate.

What you’ll own

• End-to-end platform infrastructure - architecture, build, and operational maturity
• Production AWS environments (EKS, RDS/Aurora, VPC, ALB/NLB, IAM, ElastiCache, CloudFront)
• Kubernetes at scale - cluster management, autoscaling, and networking policies
• Microservices architecture - service discovery, resilience, and load balancing
• Database performance and scalability - replication, sharding, caching
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or similar)
• CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, or similar)
• Observability - logging, tracing, alerting, SLOs
• Security - IAM, network segmentation, and secrets management

What we’re looking for

• 4 to 7 years in platform, DevOps, or infrastructure engineering
• At least 2 years in a leadership or lead role
• Strong AWS and Kubernetes experience in production environments
• Deep understanding of distributed systems and scalable architecture
• Comfortable working with AI-assisted tooling and automation
• Excellent written communication skills (async-first environment)

⭐ Nice to have

• Experience in regulated environments (PCI DSS, SOC 2)
• Exposure to Azure
• FinOps and cost optimisation experience