DevOps Engineer

Duku AI; Durban; On-site; ZAR 500,000 - 700,000; Full time

Job summary

Duku AI, based in Durban, is seeking an exceptional DevOps Engineer to design and operate the cloud infrastructure for our innovative autonomous testing agents. The role demands a strong background in CI/CD and Kubernetes, driving reliable daily software deployments.

You'll have the opportunity to propel the industry forward as software production scales. If you thrive in dynamic environments with high ownership and possess a relentless drive, Duku AI is the place to make a significant impact.

Qualifications

• Experience with cloud infrastructure management.
• Proven ability to run production workloads on Kubernetes.
• Strong background in CI/CD pipeline management.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the cloud infrastructure for autonomous testing.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for reliable daily deployments.
• Define infrastructure as code for reproducibility and ease of review.
• Manage containerized workloads and scalability on Kubernetes.
• Establish observability and incident response for operational reliability.

Skills

Cloud fluency (AWS/GCP, Kubernetes)

Reliability obsession

Automation reflex

Startup experience

Tools

Terraform/Pulumi

Kubernetes

Job description

Most engineering roles build software nobody fully trusts. This one builds the trust layer itself. AI is making engineers dramatically more productive. The problem is nobody fully trusts what AI ships.

Why this matters now

AI is rewriting how software gets built. But shipping still breaks on testing. Engineering leaders are desperate to release faster without dropping quality, and they can't get there with manual QA or brittle test automation.

Here’s the bigger shift: as AI writes more of the code, the bottleneck moves from generating software to trusting it. Nobody owns that trust layer yet. Duku is building it, autonomous agents that simulate real users, catch critical failures before production, and self-heal as the product evolves.

Backed by experienced operators and investors, we're building what we believe will become a core layer of the modern software stack. We're looking for an exceptional DevOps Engineer to help build it. Not someone to maintain a codebase. Someone to define one.

What You’ll Do

• Own the platform: Design, build, and operate the cloud infrastructure that runs our autonomous testing agents, from commit to production.
• Make shipping effortless: Build and harden CI/CD pipelines so engineers deploy daily with confidence, not anxiety.
• Infrastructure as code: Define everything in Terraform/Pulumi, reproducible, reviewable, and disposable.
• Scale the agents: Run containerised, orchestrated workloads on Kubernetes that spin up and tear down thousands of simulated user sessions on demand.
• Own reliability: Design observability, alerting, and incident response so we catch failures before customers do.
• Tame cost and performance: Keep the cloud bill sane while the workload grows 10x.

What We’re Looking For

• Relentless drive: You execute fast, adapt faster.
• Startup scar tissue: You’ve kept production alive with no safety net.
• Cloud fluency: AWS/GCP, containers, Kubernetes, networking, IAM, you’ve built it, not just configured it.
• Automation reflex: If you’ve done it twice by hand, you’ve already scripted the third time.
• Reliability obsession: You care more about uptime and recovery than dashboards that look pretty.
• Security-aware by default: Secrets, least privilege, and supply-chain hygiene are habits, not afterthoughts.

Ideal Background

• Built and scaled infra for a high-velocity product from 0 to 1.
• Owned CI/CD and platform tooling for a fast-shipping engineering team.
• Run production workloads on Kubernetes under real load.
• Thrived in chaos with high ownership.

Why This Matters

Software is accelerating. The infrastructure under it has to keep up. As AI ships more code faster, the platform that tests, deploys, and trusts that code becomes the bottleneck, or the unlock.

Five years from now, every high-velocity team will run on infrastructure like the one you’ll build here. Join now, and help make that future real, before someone else does.