Manager - Customer Reliability Engineer.MTN Software Solutions

MTN Group; Johannesburg; On-site; ZAR 800,000 - 1,000,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading telecommunications company based in Johannesburg seeks a Senior Reliability Engineer to enhance system uptime and foster a high-performing engineering team. Ideal candidates will have 7–10 years in IT operations, strong leadership experience, and hands-on expertise with observability tools. This role plays a critical part in ensuring optimal performance and reliability of customer-facing systems, supporting the company’s commitment to service excellence.

Qualifications

• 7–10 years of experience in IT operations or reliability engineering.
• 3–5 years in a leadership role leading reliability or DevOps teams.

Responsibilities

• Achieve improvements in system uptime through reliability engineering practices.
• Lead and develop a skilled team focused on ownership and collaboration.
• Ensure that reliability is embedded into service design and operations.
• Deliver actionable reporting on reliability metrics.

Skills

Hands-on experience with observability platforms

Incident response leadership

Experience with cross-functional teams

Understanding of cloud-native technologies

Education

Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related field

Certifications in SRE, DevOps, or Cloud Infrastructure

Master’s Degree in Technology Management

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

Splunk

Kubernetes

Job description

Responsibilities

• Achieve measurable improvements in system uptime and performance by implementing robust reliability engineering practices and leading incident prevention initiatives.
• Reduce Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) through streamlined incident response protocols and team readiness, ensuring minimal disruption to customers.
• Build, lead, and develop a skilled team of Customer Reliability Engineers with a strong focus on ownership, collaboration, and continuous learning.
• Ensure that reliability is embedded into service design, development, deployment, and operations by partnering with engineering, product, and operations teams.
• Deliver clear and actionable reporting on reliability metrics to support leadership decision-making and continuous improvement.
• Align reliability goals with customer expectations by addressing root causes of service degradation and championing seamless user experiences.
• Identify and address potential reliability risks before they impact customers by implementing observability tools, runbooks, and automated responses.
• Drive reliability improvements that also reduce operational costs by eliminating manual processes, optimizing resource usage, and reducing reactive work.
• Ensure the continuous and stable operation of customer-facing systems by applying reliability engineering principles and best practices.
• Oversee timely incident response, root cause analysis, and implementation of long-term fixes to prevent recurring issues and improve service resilience.
• Build and lead a high-performing reliability engineering team, providing coaching, mentorship, and career development to support individual and team growth.
• Work closely with software engineering, DevOps, product, and support teams to embed reliability into the end-to-end service lifecycle.
• Ensure effective monitoring systems, dashboards, and alerts are in place to detect, respond to, and analyze system performance and failures.
• Define and drive the implementation of a reliability roadmap aligned with business objectives, system scalability, and customer needs.
• Translate system performance into customer impact metrics (e.g., downtime minutes) and work to continuously enhance the end-user experience.
• Track and report on key reliability metrics such as uptime, latency, error rates, and incident frequency to support transparency and data-driven decisions.
• Proactively identify technical and operational risks, ensuring mitigation strategies are in place and aligned with compliance standards.
• Foster a culture of experimentation and improvement by exploring automation, new tools, and process enhancements to strengthen reliability practices.

Education

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related technical discipline.
• Certifications in relevant areas such as Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, ITIL, or Cloud Infrastructure (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) are highly desirable.
• A Master’s Degree in Technology Management, Engineering, or Business Administration is an added advantage

Experience

• Experience: 7–10 years of experience in IT operations, systems engineering, or reliability engineering within a technology-driven environment.
• At least 3–5 years in a leadership or managerial role, with proven experience leading reliability or DevOps teams.

Skills

• Hands-on experience implementing and managing observability platforms, monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk), and automation frameworks.
• Demonstrated ability to lead incident response efforts, conduct root cause analysis, and implement sustainable, long-term service reliability improvements.
• Experience working in agile environments and with cross-functional teams, including software development, infrastructure, product, and support.
• Strong understanding of cloud-native technologies, container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes), CI / CD pipelines, and infrastructure as code (e.g., Terraform, Ansible).