Biz Dev Ops Engineer (Contract)

The Focus Group; Sandton; On-site; ZAR 1,000,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Job summary

The Focus Group in Sandton is seeking a Senior DevOps & Site Reliability Engineer to design, implement, and maintain scalable, secure, and automated technology platforms supporting mission-critical applications.

You will lead platform engineering, CI/CD, SRE practices, cloud operations, and security controls, driving reliability, performance, and deployment velocity across delivery teams in a hybrid, enterprise environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, Information Systems or equivalent technical qualification.
• 8+ years software engineering, infrastructure, cloud, DevOps, or platform engineering experience.
• 5+ years hands-on DevOps engineering experience.
• 3+ years in SRE or production operations environments.
• Proven experience managing mission-critical production systems.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain cloud-native infrastructure and platform services.
• Develop Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions using modern automation frameworks.
• Build reusable deployment templates, pipelines, and automation tooling.
• Standardize platform engineering practices across teams.
• Automate provisioning, configuration management, and operational processes.
• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines for both application and infrastructure deployments.
• Implement automated testing, security scanning, code quality controls, and release automation.
• Drive continuous improvement of release management processes.
• Enable fully automated deployment and rollback capabilities.
• Improve deployment frequency while reducing deployment risk.
• Establish reliability engineering practices and operational standards.
• Define and manage SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs.
• Improve system availability, performance, resilience, and scalability.
• Lead incident response, problem management, and root cause analysis activities.
• Drive proactive reliability improvements and technical debt reduction.
• Design and manage cloud infrastructure environments.
• Optimize performance, availability, security, and cost management.
• Implement high-availability and disaster recovery solutions.
• Support hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud environments where applicable.
• Implement enterprise monitoring and observability platforms.
• Establish logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting standards.
• Build operational dashboards and platform insights.
• Reduce MTTR and MTTD.
• Drive predictive monitoring and proactive issue detection.
• Implement DevSecOps practices throughout the software delivery lifecycle.
• Integrate security controls into CI/CD pipelines.
• Support vulnerability management and remediation activities.
• Ensure compliance with security and regulatory requirements.
• Collaborate with security teams to improve platform security posture.
• Provide technical leadership across engineering teams.
• Mentor DevOps, platform, cloud, and reliability engineers.
• Promote engineering excellence and operational best practices.
• Contribute to architectural decisions and roadmaps.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives to improve engineering productivity.

Skills

DevOps

SRE

Cloud

CI/CD

IaC

Automation

Monitoring

Security

Leadership

Incident Mgmt

Education

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science / IT / Software Engineering / Information Systems

Tools

Azure DevOps

GitHub Enterprise

Git

Jenkins

SonarQube

Terraform

Kubernetes

Docker

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Job Purpose

The Senior DevOps & Site Reliability Engineer is responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining highly available, scalable, secure, and automated technology platforms that support mission-critical business applications. The role combines software engineering, platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, automation, observability, and operational excellence to improve system reliability, deployment velocity, platform resilience, and customer experience.

The incumbent will drive DevOps and SRE best practices across delivery teams, ensuring that systems are built, deployed, monitored, and operated efficiently while maintaining stringent availability, security, and performance standards.

Key Responsibilities

Platform Engineering & Automation

• Design, build, and maintain cloud-native infrastructure and platform services.
• Develop Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions using modern automation frameworks.
• Build reusable deployment templates, pipelines, and automation tooling.
• Standardize platform engineering practices across teams.
• Automate provisioning, configuration management, and operational processes.

DevOps & CI/CD

• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines supporting both application and infrastructure deployments.
• Implement automated testing, security scanning, code quality controls, and release automation.
• Drive continuous improvement of release management processes.
• Enable fully automated deployment and rollback capabilities.
• Improve deployment frequency while reducing deployment risk.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

• Establish reliability engineering practices and operational standards.
• Define and manage Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
• Improve system availability, performance, resilience, and scalability.
• Lead incident response, problem management, and root cause analysis activities.
• Drive proactive reliability improvements and technical debt reduction.

Cloud Operations

• Design and manage cloud infrastructure environments.
• Optimize performance, availability, security, and cost management.
• Implement high-availability and disaster recovery solutions.
• Support hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud environments where applicable.

Monitoring & Observability

• Implement enterprise monitoring and observability platforms.
• Establish logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting standards.
• Build operational dashboards and platform insights.
• Reduce mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to recover (MTTR).
• Drive predictive monitoring and proactive issue detection.

Security & Compliance

• Implement DevSecOps practices throughout the software delivery lifecycle.
• Integrate security controls into CI/CD pipelines.
• Support vulnerability management and remediation activities.
• Ensure compliance with organizational security and regulatory requirements.
• Collaborate with security teams to improve platform security posture.

Leadership & Mentoring

• Provide technical leadership across engineering teams.
• Mentor DevOps, platform, cloud, and reliability engineers.
• Promote engineering excellence and operational best practices.
• Contribute to architectural decisions and technology roadmaps.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives to improve engineering productivity.

Minimum Qualifications

Preferred:

• Bachelor's Degree in:
  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Equivalent technical qualification

Minimum Experience

• 8+ years of software engineering, infrastructure, cloud, DevOps, or platform engineering experience.
• 5+ years of hands-on DevOps engineering experience.
• 3+ years in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) or production operations environments.
• Proven experience managing mission-critical production systems.
• Experience operating large-scale enterprise platforms.

Technical Skills

Cloud Platforms

Strong experience with:

• Microsoft Azure
• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
• Azure App Services
• Azure Networking
• Azure Monitor
• Azure Storage
• Azure Identity Services

Exposure to AWS and Google Cloud is advantageous.

DevOps Tooling

• Azure DevOps
• GitHub Enterprise
• Git
• Jenkins
• SonarQube
• Artifactory
• Nexus

Infrastructure as Code

• Terraform
• Bicep
• ARM Templates
• Ansible

Containerisation & Orchestration

• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Helm
• OpenShift (advantageous)

Observability

• Dynatrace
• Grafana
• Prometheus
• Elastic Stack
• Splunk
• Azure Monitor
• OpenTelemetry

Programming & Scripting

• Python
• PowerShell
• Bash
• C#
• Java
• Go (advantageous)

Technical Competencies

• Cloud Architecture
• Reliability Engineering
• Platform Engineering
• Infrastructure Automation
• Continuous Delivery
• DevSecOps
• Systems Integration
• Capacity Planning
• Performance Optimization
• Incident Management

Behavioural Competencies

• Strategic Thinking
• Problem Solving
• Collaboration
• Decision Making
• Stakeholder Management
• Innovation
• Continuous Improvement
• Coaching and Mentoring
• Customer Centricity
• Accountability

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

The role will be measured against:

• Platform availability targets
• SLO/SLA compliance
• Deployment success rate
• Change failure rate
• Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)
• Mean Time to Recover (MTTR)
• Automation coverage
• Security and compliance adherence
• Cost optimization targets
• Engineering productivity improvements

Preferred Certifications

• Microsoft Certified: Azure DevOps Engineer Expert
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
• Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)
• HashiCorp Terraform Associate
• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
• ITIL Foundation
• SRE Foundation Certification

Ideal Candidate Profile

An experienced engineering professional who can bridge software development, cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, and operations. The successful candidate will possess deep technical expertise, a strong automation mindset, and a passion for building reliable, secure, scalable platforms while enabling engineering teams to deliver business value rapidly and safely