Senior DevOps Engineer at Prodigy Finance

This role is perfect for an experienced DevOps engineer who wants to supercharge their career by experiencing first-hand what it is like to be part of an energetic, extremely fast-growing company.

The sense of impact and reward will be huge. You will help to build a product which makes a very real difference in the world. Be a part of delivering socially responsible financial services to the masses; make it possible for students from more than 150 countries to obtain the finance to fulfil their dream of studying at the world’s top universities and schools.

We are a non-hierarchical team; this means that you are going to get exposure to all aspects of our business immediately. You’ll gain as much accountability as you can handle and have a huge influence on scaling the company.

Our team is very international and very sociable; you will interact with the broader business on a regular basis. The position will be based in Cape Town.

One of our goals is to build one of the top FinTech teams and cultures anywhere in the world. This means putting a lot of time into ensuring we only hire people with exceptional potential and creating the best working environment possible. If you want to work somewhere where you're learning from some of the best brains in FinTech, this would be a good fit.

Why join Prodigy Finance

• Be a part of a pioneering global growth company
• Experience the excitement and learn from being part of an incredibly fast-growing young company. No kidding – exponential growth. Happening right now
• Be pivotal in scaling the business by identifying smart solutions and partners with tech at the heart of it
• Enjoy the agility and flexibility offered by a startup culture. A sociable, relaxed and friendly work environment (with a serious coffee culture where you can wear shorts to work)
• We will help you make your mark. Make a real impact on the business and experience a steep learning curve with huge opportunities to grow and develop
• Gain an inside perspective on the functioning of a venture-backed FinTech startup, backed by one of the top European VCs, learn day-to-day management and build functional expertise
• Build a platform that helps to make a very real difference in the world

What you will do in the role                                                      

As a Senior DevOps Engineer, you will take a leading role in instilling a DevOps culture within the larger technology team, mentoring engineers and help to guide development teams adhere to best practice and evolving industry standards. You will lead by example, ensuring that the rest of the technology team is working with your vision. This is a specialised role; half trail-blazer, half coach.

Specific responsibilities are to:

• Teach and mentor DevOps to other engineers within the technology team
• Set DevOps best practices for the technology team as a whole, enabling them to implement these practices in their daily work
• Document and explain best practices to the broader technology team
• Build and prototype ideas into working proofs of concept
• Architect and implement scalable solutions to assist the technology team accomplish their goals

What you will be measured on

You’ll be measured on the following:

• Technical competence; you love coding and solving problems with the ability to learn new paradigms quickly
• Excellent critical judgement; able to make good decisions, be trusted, respected and dependable, be proactive and responsive, ask the right questions, raise flags at the right time, able to prioritise and plan workloads for the team
• Technical leadership and team spirit; we are all contributing to the same platform, so be a great individual contributor and motivate the team through leading to achieve our collective goals – we only win if the team wins – see the impact of your own work and positively influence and help the work of others
• Get stuck in, execute, generate ideas, have an impact, don’t just sit back and be a passenger
• Being level-headed; keeping your head when everyone around you is losing theirs

What you need to be great at

• Be a strong, balanced and flexible team player in an Agile context
• Ability to influence and mentor development teams and foster a DevOps culture from the ground up
• Excellent communication skills and a strong team working ethic
• Proven ability to automate provisioning and maintenance of infrastructure in a cloud environment
• Strong troubleshooting and problem solving ability
• Proficient with technologies used within the business such as Ruby on Rails, Python, Terraform and PostgreSQL
• Experience building microservices or service-oriented architectures (SOA and REST)
• Solid understanding of data integrity, security and continuity of business

 Who we are looking for; track record must haves

• BSc in Computer Science or relevant experience
• 2+ years’ experience as a Senior Software Engineer or Technical lead, with 8+ years overall experience as a Software Engineer or equivalent
• Deep and broad experience with Amazon Web Services
• Extensive work experience with container orchestration in high-volume, distributed systems
• Proficient in at least one object-oriented and one scripting language
• Experience with monitoring, logging and alerting solutions – the more the better
• Deep understanding of IPv4 networking, web protocols and Linux/Unix systems

 Experience that would be nice to have (but we’ll trade off if everything else fits)

• Enjoy optimising systems by investigating and diving deep (beyond speeding up build times)
• Experience with JIRA or another issue-tracking product
• A solid track record of deploying and managing microservices
• Experience with online version control services such as GitHub or Bitbucket
• Experience with configuration management tools such as Chef, Puppet, Salt, or Ansible in production environments
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code using Terraform or CloudFormation
• Experience with CI/CD systems such as Jenkins