Operations Engineer (Senior) - DevOps & Cloud

Probe Group; Pretoria; On-site; ZAR 800,000 - 1,200,000; Full time

Job summary

Probe Group is seeking a Senior Operations Engineer to lead automation, IaC and DevOps practices across cloud and on-prem environments. You will drive CI/CD, incident management and governance, ensuring reliability and security of enterprise applications.

You will mentor juniors, design scalable solutions, and collaborate with distributed teams to improve runbooks, monitoring and observability while maintaining security controls and lifecycle governance.

Qualifications

• Bachelor-level IT knowledge with hands-on experience in enterprise environments.
• Strong troubleshooting abilities and incident management experience.
• Proven capability to design and implement automated infrastructure solutions.

Responsibilities

• Lead configuration management and infrastructure automation initiatives.
• Design, implement and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and automation solutions.
• Build, maintain and optimise CI/CD pipelines.
• Support and improve cloud and on-premises production environments.
• Drive change, release and transition processes and governance.
• Maintain governance standards for configuration and releases.
• Act as senior escalation point for complex incidents and perform RCA.
• Implement monitoring, logging and observability capabilities.
• Collaborate with teams to ensure reliable, scalable solutions.
• Develop and maintain runbooks, procedures and technical docs.

Skills

Configuration Management

Scripting & Automation

CI/CD

Infrastructure as Code

Cloud Platforms

Monitoring & Observability

Linux/Windows Admin

ITSM/ITIL

Git version control

Education

IT degree, diploma or equivalent qualification

Tools

Terraform

AWS

Azure

Jenkins

GitLab CI / GitHub Actions

Prometheus

Grafana

ELK/EFK

Kubernetes

Job description

Introduction

An exciting opportunity is available for an experienced Senior Operations Engineer to join a highly technical, internationally integrated IT environment.

The successful candidate will play a key role in ensuring the reliability, availability, security and operational stability of enterprise applications and infrastructure across cloud and on-premises environments.

This position requires a strong combination of DevOps engineering, infrastructure automation, cloud operations, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, observability, incident management and IT Service Management.

Duties & Responsibilities

• Lead configuration management and infrastructure automation initiatives.
• Design, implement and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and automation solutions.
• Build, maintain and optimise CI/CD pipelines.
• Support and improve cloud and on-premises production environments.
• Drive effective change, release and transition management.
• Ensure configuration, release and change governance standards are maintained.
• Act as a senior escalation point for complex production incidents.
• Lead troubleshooting, Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and post-incident improvement activities.
• Implement and enhance monitoring, logging and observability capabilities.
• Collaborate with infrastructure and development teams to ensure solutions are designed for operational reliability and supportability.
• Develop and maintain runbooks, operational procedures and technical documentation.
• Monitor operational KPIs, service quality, availability and reliability.
• Support IT Service Continuity, resilience and disaster-recovery requirements.
• Facilitate technical onboarding, knowledge transfer and training.
• Mentor and support junior Operations/DevOps engineers.
• Drive continuous improvement and automation to reduce manual operational effort.
• Ensure infrastructure and applications comply with security, lifecycle and governance requirements.
• Maintain effective communication with technical and business stakeholders.
• Support SLA/OLA and availability requirements.
• Collaborate with geographically distributed and international DevOps teams.

Desired Experience & Qualification

ssential Technical Skills

Applicants should have strong practical experience in most of the following:

• Configuration Management: Ansible, Puppet, Chef and/or Salt
• Scripting & Automation: Python, Bash and/or PowerShell
• CI/CD: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions or equivalent
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, AWS CloudFormation or equivalent
• Cloud Platforms: AWS, Azure or equivalent
• Monitoring & Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK or comparable enterprise monitoring solutions
• Linux and/or Windows infrastructure administration
• Production troubleshooting and Root Cause Analysis
• Change, Release and Transition Management
• ITSM/ITIL processes and operational governance
• Git/version-control environments

Advantageous Skills

Experience in the following will be beneficial:

• Docker and Kubernetes
• DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices
• SLIs, SLOs and error budgets
• Middleware and enterprise platform technologies
• Infrastructure security, hardening and lifecycle management
• Data-centre infrastructure, networking, storage and servers
• Highly regulated enterprise environments, particularly financial services or automotive
• Deployment and testing automation
• Data pipelines and/or ML deployment environments
• Communities of Practice or Centres of Excellence
• Mentoring/coaching junior technical professionals
• German language capability

Qualifications & Experience

• Relevant IT degree, diploma or equivalent qualification
• Approximately 6–10 years' broad IT experience
• At least 3–5 years' experience in IT Operations, DevOps, SRE, Cloud Operations or a closely related environment
• Proven experience supporting complex production environments
• Demonstrable experience with transition, change and release management
• ITIL Foundation and Service Transition experience/qualification or equivalent is advantageous/highly preferred
• Strong troubleshooting and analytical capability
• Excellent stakeholder communication skills
• Demonstrated ability to operate effectively within multidisciplinary technical teams