Lead DevOps Engineer (South Africa)

Tech-Keys; Pretoria; Remote; ZAR 300,000 - 400,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading tech company in Pretoria is seeking a Workflow Coordinator to manage the planning and delivery pipeline for all platform engineering tasks. The successful candidate will maintain project roadmaps, facilitate team collaboration, and ensure timely delivery of features. Applicants should have over 2 years of experience in managing project workflows and possess strong communication skills. This role involves remote collaboration, with flexibility in work hours.

Qualifications

• 2+ years coordinating and/or managing workflows, systems or projects.
• Proven ability to break down work, set deadlines, and hit them.
• Comfort with EST work hours and remote collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain the master roadmap in GitHub Projects / Azure DevOps.
• Monitor cross-team dependencies and coordinate when projects overlap.
• Run planning sessions, standups, and retros; define sprint cadence as needed.

Skills

GitHub

Azure DevOps

Canny

Project management

Written communication

Meeting facilitation

Organization

Remote collaboration

Job description

Purpose

Owns the planning and delivery pipeline for all platform engineering work. Provides real-time visibility, accurate timelines, and reliable execution without managing people.

Core responsibilities

• Build and maintain the master roadmap in GitHub Projects / Azure DevOps and Ignite
• Convert incoming ideas into scoped items with clear acceptance criteria and ETAs
• Keep a live dashboard that shows status, blockers, and forecast completion dates
• Run planning sessions, standups, and retros; define sprint cadence as needed
• Track and report metrics to leadership every week
• Facilitate documentation of new processes and integrations
• Organize and deliver training sessions that improve team adoption of the workflow
• Work with engineers on estimation, planning, and process discipline
• Perform weekly backlog grooming to merge duplicates, close stale items, and re-confirm priorities with stakeholders
• Monitor cross-team dependencies and coordinate when projects overlap
• Maintain a high-level understanding of all active projects so you can step in when an engineer is out

Decision making authority

• Can adjust ETAs and sequence work to hit goals
• Escalates capacity conflicts and cross team tradeoffs to Head of Technology
• Can assign owners to projects and set due dates
• Can accept and reject new ideas that come though the project pipeline
• Does not manage people. All managerial tasks and issues are managed by Head of Technology

Mentorship expectations

• Weekly calls with each engineer to review assignments and ensure tasks are on schedule
• Daily stand ups
• Coach engineers on writing thorough notes and status updates
• Reviews progress and flags issues early
• Onboard new team members
• Create and maintain training materials

Expected Outcomes : Success metrics

• Bugs closed weekly greater than bugs opened weekly
• Intake to triage within 2 days
• 1 feature request completed per every 2 weeks
• Documentation coverage for new and existing deliverables
• Reopen rate under 5%
• First 90 days
• Establish and document intake process
• Clean and tag all backlog items
• Create an executive dashboard that gives a high overview of where projects stand.
• Ensure all projects, tasks and items are in Azure DevOps with due dates on each item, an owner and a full plan

Interview Process

Apply to the position, upload your resume, and answer the questions in the application.

• Upon reviewing your resume, we’ll send you an email with a link to perform a one-way video interview.
• Upon reviewing the video interview, we’ll email you asking to setup an in-person interview.
• After the interview we will email you asking for references.
• We will call you letting you know our decision and discuss compensation.
• At any point during this process if we feel you will not be a fit, we will let you know, we do not leave applications unanswered!

Required tools and skills

• Working knowledge of GitHub, Canny and Azure DevOps
• Working knowledge of modern programming flows
• Proven ability to break down work, set deadlines, and hit them
• Strong written communication and meeting facilitation
• Comfort with EST work hours and remote collaboration
• Highly organized, reliable, calm under pressure
• Can influence without authority and drive adoption

Experience

• 2+ years coordinating and / or managing workflows, systems or projects