OM Bank - Senior Platform Engineer

Old Mutual South Africa; Johannesburg; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,500,000; Full time

Job summary

Old Mutual South Africa is seeking an experienced Platform Engineer to build scalable, enterprise-grade platforms that enable agility and rapid deployment. You will collaborate with Development, DevOps and Infra teams to ensure systems are reliable and performant under load.

You will own platform performance, deploy lifecycle, and cost optimisation while driving adoption of new practices. A Bachelor’s degree and 7+ years in platform engineering are expected, with strong Kubernetes, AWS,

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, IT or related field.
• 7+ years in software and platform engineering for scalable services.
• 3-5 years writing infrastructure as code (Terraform, AWS CDK, CloudFormation).
• Experience with observability platforms like Datadog.
• Experience with microservices architecture and RESTful APIs.

Responsibilities

• Take end-to-end ownership of platform performance across dev, test and prod.
• Build scalable, enterprise-grade platforms aligned to business objectives.
• Lead resolution of platform service issues with minimal disruption.
• Shape platform deployment tools, processes, dependencies and docs.
• Drive cost optimisation and efficiency through solution design.

Skills

Kubernetes

AWS

Terraform

Datadog

RESTful API

Microservices

Go

Python

GitOps

Helm

HPA

CloudFormation

SQS

Kafka

CI/CD

Education

Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field

Tools

Terraform

AWS CDK

CloudFormation

Datadog

Kubernetes

Helm

GitOps

Job description

We are seeking an experienced Platform Engineer to build high performing, scalable enterprise grade platforms that enable business agility and rapid deployment within an ever changing business environment. This is achieved by embracing system and design thinking to implement platforms leveraging software automation principles and data driven insights. You will work closely with development, DevOps, and infrastructure teams to ensure our systems are scalable, reliable, and performant under load.

KEY RESULT AREAS

Platform Engineer

• Take full accountability for end-to-end platform performance and resulting customer experience across development, test and production instances.
• Build sustainable platforms that satisfy customer requirements and align with the broader technology objectives
• Implement SLA, OLA & quality metrics, best practices, and patterns across the platform
• Lead the resolution of platform service issues by directing efforts to restore service with minimal disruption to the customer and business
• Resolve platform issues, including interdependent services outside the immediate area of responsibility; lead discussions with peers to take action to ensure the sustainable success of the platform.
• Align teams to service Improvement & innovation plan requirements and drive effective implementation
• Leverage systems & processes to measure, monitor and manage the performance of the platform ensuring ongoing optimisation.
• Use production performance monitoring and customer data to make technical design and implementation decisions
• Develop innovative methods for measuring customer experience, and use this data to identify and drive platform improvements
• Translate performance data into insights for technical service & solution improvement and enhancement
• Identify new and emerging practices for managing problems within the area and lead the adoption of new practices, across groups or disciplines with the aim of improving analytical capabilities
• Identify & leverage the appropriate internal or external technologies to deliver the platform service, applying the Old Mutual Cloud guardrails
• Own the design of the platform deployment system and associated tools, hardware, processes, role assignments, dependencies, and documentation
• Lead the development and deployment lifecycle for ‘platform / platform components as a service’
• Continually develop initiatives to reduce and optimise operational costs & increase strategic & operational efficiency through solution designs

Financial & Cost Optimisation, Risk & Governance

• Take full accountability for delivering an optimal Platform Engineering cost model
• Analyse operational cost data, identify cost-savings & efficiencies and drive adoption
• Hold accountability for all risk and open audit items associated with the platform
• Apply & maintain all Group risk (e.g. Architecture, development etc.), governance, compliance & regulatory standards and frameworks
• Update & or develop & maintain all application documentation

People

• Build / contribute to a high performance team environment & culture through self-directed teams by driving performance management & measurement that is aligned with agile working practices
• Actively participate and contribute within the cross functional team.
• Proactively lead the implementation of agile practices, remove barriers to success and ensure seamless delivery in a continuously changing work environment
• Identify and develop learning plans for the platform engineering role
• Coach & mentor other engineers & support engineering teams on technical solutions and problem resolution

• Participate in peer reviews, testing, problem solving within and across the broader team

ROLE REQUIREMENTS

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, electrical or electronic engineering, Information Technology, or relevant field
• 7+ years of software and platform engineering experience building and supporting scalable services
• 3-5 years experience in writing infrastructure as code (Terraform, AWS CDK, Cloudformation)
• Solid experience using observability platforms like Datadog
• Experience with microservices architecture and Restful API
• Solid Kubernetes experiencing displaying end to end deployment and maintenance of clusters including designing and building infrastructure as code required to deploy the cluster and required cloud resources that support the cluster
• Experience with Kubernetes custom resource management and deployment
• Solid experiencing deploying Kubernetes resources using Helm Charts
• Experience in fine tuning Kubernetes HPA configs
• Moderate experience using go/python programming language
• Solid experience using GitOps and general git based operations
• Solid infrastructure as code background displaying experience in designing, implementing and maintaining IAC design patterns that manage large scale cloud environment.
• Solid AWS experience, displaying advanced understanding of cloud architecture and maintaining distributed systems
• Experience maintaining queuing systems like AWS SQS and event streaming platforms like Kafka
• Experience supporting mobile applications