Platform Engineer (AWS, GitHub Actions, Heroku CI) (JHB) at Datafin Recruitment

ENVIRONMENT:

• A provider of cutting-edge Financial Tools in Joburg seeks the technical expertise of a Platform Engineer to manage Heroku pipelines, CI/CD, review apps, and production environments.
• You will also operate Celery workers and queues, monitor health, and handle missed task check-ins, manage Cloudflare for DNS, edge security, and performance optimisation & collaborate with Developers to streamline workflows and educate on secure coding practices.
• The ideal candidate must have 3+ years’ operating production apps on Heroku, AWS, DigitalOcean, or similar, CI/CD pipelines: Hands-on experience with GitHub Actions, Heroku CI, or equivalent; solid Git fundamentals and Monitoring & incident response: Experience with Sentry, Papertrail (or similar), logs, and uptime/performance dashboards.

DUTIES:

Reliability & Operations –

• Own uptime, performance, and monitoring for all production applications.
• Manage Heroku pipelines, CI/CD, review apps, and production environments.
• Operate Celery workers and queues, monitor health, and handle missed task check-ins.
• Define and track service level objectives (SLOs) (availability, latency, task success rate).
• Maintain runbooks, a centralised wiki for incident response, and lead post-mortems.
• Run periodic disaster recovery drills and coordinate Penetration Tests.

Platform Engineering –

• Keep environments current (Heroku stacks, Postgres/Redis versions, DO/AWS base images).
• Manage daily backups, ensure restore tests and disaster recovery runbooks are in place.
• Standardise infrastructure (Terraform or scripts for DO/AWS; app.json for Heroku).
• Manage Cloudflare for DNS, edge security, and performance optimisation.
• Tune performance (DB indices, query optimisation, cache usage, Celery queue design).
• Optimise infrastructure costs across Heroku, DigitalOcean, and AWS.

Developer Experience & CI/CD –

• Maintain CI pipelines with type checking, linting, and security scanning.
• Enforce test coverage and automate deploy checks (smoke tests, migration health, error budgets).
• Support Developers with tooling for local/staging environments and build self-service dashboards (e.g., Celery queue status).
• Collaborate with Developers to streamline workflows and educate on secure coding practices.

Security & Compliance –

• Own vulnerability management and dependency patching cadence.
• Manage access reviews, secrets, MFA/SSO, and enforce least-privilege IAM policies.
• Implement encryption for data at rest and in transit (e.g., S3 server-side encryption).
• Contribute evidence and responses for security questionnaires and SOC 2 audits.
• Maintain a “security pack” with architecture, sub-processors, and DR/backup processes.

Monitoring & Alerting –

• Configure Sentry ownership rules, Cron Monitors, and release health.
• Centralise metrics/logs (Heroku metrics, Papertrail, Sentry, APM, Prometheus/New Relic).
• Set up alerts on golden signals (latency, errors, traffic, saturation) and avoid alert fatigue.
• Conduct capacity planning and track resource usage trends.

Vendor & External Services –

• Evaluate and manage vendor relationships (e.g., Mailgun, Twilio) to ensure service level agreements (SLAs) and performance.
• Assess new tools/services to enhance platform capabilities (e.g., observability, security).
• Track costs, security posture, and integration quality for all third-party services.

REQUIREMENTS:

Must-Haves –

• Cloud Infrastructure Management: 3+ years’ operating production apps on Heroku, AWS, DigitalOcean, or similar.
• CI/CD pipelines: Hands-on experience with GitHub Actions, Heroku CI, or equivalent; solid Git fundamentals.
• Monitoring & incident response: Experience with Sentry, Papertrail (or similar), logs, and uptime/performance dashboards.
• Security Fundamentals: Understanding of IAM, encryption in transit/at rest, MFA/SSO, and secure configuration practices.
• Disaster recovery & backups: Experience implementing and operating automated backups, restore testing, and writing/maintaining incident runbooks.
• Communication & collaboration: Ability to document processes clearly and work closely with Developers in a small team.

Strong Plus –

• Infrastructure as Code & automation: Experience with Terraform, Docker, or equivalent tooling.
• Asynchronous workloads: Familiarity with Celery, Redis, or other task queues and message brokers.
• Scaling & cost optimisation: Capacity planning, performance tuning, and managing infra spend.
• Compliance frameworks: Exposure to SOC 2, GDPR, or supporting client security questionnaires.
• Incident management: Participation in on-call rotations, leading post-mortems, or serving as incident commander.

Nice-to-Haves –

• Certifications (AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, CKS, or equivalent).
• Proficiency in Python; familiarity with Django/Flask.
• Experience with DNS/CDN/edge security (e.g., Cloudflare).
• Observability platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic).
• Static analysis and code quality tools (mypy, Bandit, SonarQube).
• Prior exposure to multi-tenant SaaS environments.