AWS DevOps Consultant

Sabenza IT & Recruitment; South Africa; Hybrid; ZAR 900,000 - 1,500,000; Full time

Job summary

Sabenza IT & Recruitment seeks a Senior AWS DevOps Engineer to lead design, automation, security, and reliability for a production AWS platform in a hybrid setup from Johannesburg. You will work with software teams to enable secure, reliable software delivery and maintain highly available environments.

Ideal candidates have 10+ years in Cloud/DevOps with strong production AWS experience; alternative path considers 6+ years with ownership, automation prowess, and startup/scale-up exposure.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in Cloud Engineering/DevOps/Infrastructure Engineering with strong production AWS experience at scale.
• Alternative path: 6+ years with significant production ownership, deep AWS ops, strong automation, startup/scale-up experience appreciated.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and optimise AWS cloud infrastructure with resilience and disaster recovery.
• Own and improve CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation.
• Implement Infrastructure as Code using AWS CDK and CloudFormation.
• Apply least-privilege and Zero Trust; manage encryption, KMS, Secrets Manager, and remediate findings.
• Support production environments, participate in on-call, drive root-cause analysis, and improve platform reliability.
• Mentor engineers, review infrastructure and application code, and lead modernisation initiatives.

Skills

Cloud engineering

DevOps

Automation

Security

Mentoring

Tools

AWS CDK

CloudFormation

KMS

Secrets Manager

RDS

DynamoDB

Job description

Senior AWS DevOps Engineer

Contract | 12 months | Start: January 2027 Hybrid — Johannesburg The Role

Lead the design, automation, security, reliability, and operational excellence of a production AWS platform. You’ll work closely with software engineering teams to enable secure, reliable software delivery while maintaining highly available cloud environments.

Focus: Cloud Infrastructure Engineering (40%) · DevOps & CI/CD (30%) · Automation & Software Engineering (30%)

What You’ll Do

• Design, implement, and optimise AWS cloud infrastructure with strong resilience and disaster recovery.
• Own and improve CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation.
• Implement Infrastructure as Code using AWS CDK and CloudFormation.
• Apply least-privilege and Zero Trust principles; manage encryption, KMS, Secrets Manager, and remediate security findings.
• Support production environments, participate in on-call, drive root-cause analysis, and improve platform reliability.
• Mentor engineers, review infrastructure and application code, and lead modernisation initiatives.

What You Bring

Preferred: 10+ years in Cloud Engineering, DevOps, Platform Engineering, or Infrastructure Engineering, with strong production AWS experience at scale (enterprise, startup, or scale-up).

Alternative path considered: 6+ years with significant production ownership, deep AWS operational experience, strong automation capability, and rapid technical progression (startup/scale-up experience a plus).

Core AWS skills:

Core AWS skills: ECS, Lambda, VPC, Route53, CloudFront, IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, RDS, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFormation, AWS CDK, Organizations, cross-account architectures, and cloud security governance.

Also required:

Infrastructure as Code and automationSecurity fundamentals (encryption, IAM, least privilege, Zero Trust, Security by Design)Databases: PostgreSQL and DynamoDBComfortable reading, understanding, and modifying application code; developing automation tooling and scripts

Nice to have:

Nice to have: EKS, Kubernetes, Helm, ArgoCD, CloudWatch, EventBridge, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, SonarQube, Snyk, Blue/Green deployments, and experience with AI-assisted engineering tools (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude).

What Makes You Stand Out

Startup or scale-up experienceOwnership of production AWS platformsExperience building cloud platforms from the ground upCloud transformation or modernisation track recordStrong automation background

Relevant tertiary qualification is advantageous but not essential. Equivalent practical experience will be considered.