Platform Engineer (AWS, GitHub Actions, Heroku CI) (JHB) (26559)

DataFin Recruitment; Johannesburg; On-site; ZAR 600 000 - 800 000; Full time

Job summary

A leading tech recruitment firm is seeking a skilled Platform Engineer to oversee the management of production applications on Heroku, AWS, and DigitalOcean. This role involves hands-on experience with CI/CD, ensuring system reliability, and collaborating with developers on secure coding practices. The ideal candidate should possess over 3 years of experience in cloud infrastructure management, incident response, and be adept with tools such as Terraform and Docker. This position offers an excellent opportunity to enhance platform capabilities and security compliance.

Benefits

Health benefits

Career development opportunities

Qualifications

• 3+ years’ experience managing production apps on Heroku, AWS, or DigitalOcean.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and GitHub Actions.
• Proficient in monitoring tools like Sentry and Papertrail.

Responsibilities

• Manage Heroku pipelines, CI/CD, and production environments.
• Ensure uptime and performance for all production applications.
• Support Developers with tooling and secure coding practices.

Skills

Cloud Infrastructure Management

CI/CD pipelines

Monitoring & incident response

Security Fundamentals

Communication & collaboration

Tools

Terraform

Docker

Job description

Environment

A provider of cutting-edge Financial Tools in Joburg seeks the technical expertise of a Platform Engineer to manage Heroku pipelines, CI/CD, review apps, and production environments. You will also operate Celery workers and queues, monitor health, and handle missed task check-ins, manage Cloudflare for DNS, edge security, and performance optimisation & collaborate with Developers to streamline workflows and educate on secure coding practices. The ideal candidate must have 3+ years’ operating production apps on Heroku, AWS, DigitalOcean, or similar, CI/CD pipelines: Hands‑on experience with GitHub Actions, Heroku CI, or equivalent; solid Git fundamentals and Monitoring & incident response: Experience with Sentry, Papertrail (or similar), logs, and uptime/performance dashboards.

Duties

Reliability & Operations

• Own uptime, performance, and monitoring for all production applications.
• Manage Heroku pipelines, CI/CD, review apps, and production environments.
• Operate Celery workers and queues, monitor health, and handle missed task check-ins.
• Define and track service level objectives (SLOs) (availability, latency, task success rate).
• Maintain runbooks, a centralised wiki for incident response, and lead post-mortems.
• Run periodic disaster recovery drills and coordinate Penetration Tests.

Platform Engineering

• Keep environments current (Heroku stacks, Postgres/Redis versions, DO/AWS base images).
• Manage daily backups, ensure restore tests and disaster recovery runbooks are in place.
• Standardise infrastructure (Terraform or scripts for DO/AWS; app.json for Heroku).
• Manage Cloudflare for DNS, edge security, and performance optimisation.
• Tune performance (DB indices, query optimisation, cache usage, Celery queue design).
• Optimise infrastructure costs across Heroku, DigitalOcean, and AWS.

Developer Experience & CI/CD

• Maintain CI pipelines with type checking, linting, and security scanning.
• Enforce test coverage and automate deploy checks (smoke tests, migration health, error budgets).
• Support Developers with tooling for local/staging environments and build self‑service dashboards (e.g., Celery queue status).
• Collaborate with Developers to streamline workflows and educate on secure coding practices.

Security & Compliance

• Own vulnerability management and dependency patching cadence.
• Manage access reviews, secrets, MFA/SSO, and enforce least‑privilege IAM policies.
• Implement encryption for data at rest and in transit (e.g., S3 server‑side encryption).
• Contribute evidence and responses for security questionnaires and SOC 2 audits.
• Maintain a “security pack” with architecture, sub‑processors, and DR/backup processes.

Monitoring & Alerting

• Configure Sentry ownership rules, Cron Monitors, and release health.
• Centralise metrics/logs (Heroku metrics, Papertrail, Sentry, APM, Prometheus/New Relic).
• Set up alerts on golden signals (latency, errors, traffic, saturation) and avoid alert fatigue.
• Conduct capacity planning and track resource usage trends.

Vendor & External Services

• Evaluate and manage vendor relationships (e.g., Mailgun, Twilio) to ensure service level agreements (SLAs) and performance.
• Assess new tools/services to enhance platform capabilities (e.g., observability, security).
• Track costs, security posture, and integration quality for all third‑party services.

Requirements

Must‑Haves

• Cloud Infrastructure Management: 3+ years’ operating production apps on Heroku, AWS, DigitalOcean, or similar.
• CI/CD pipelines: Hands‑on experience with GitHub Actions, Heroku CI, or equivalent; solid Git fundamentals.
• Monitoring & incident response: Experience with Sentry, Papertrail (or similar), logs, and uptime/performance dashboards.
• Security Fundamentals: Understanding of IAM, encryption in transit/at rest, MFA/SSO, and secure configuration practices.
• Disaster recovery & backups: Experience implementing and operating automated backups, restore testing, and writing/maintaining incident runbooks.
• Communication & collaboration: Ability to document processes clearly and work closely with Developers in a small team.

Strong Plus

• Infrastructure as Code & automation: Experience with Terraform, Docker, or equivalent tooling.
• Asynchronous workloads: Familiarity with Celery, Redis, or other task queues and message brokers.
• Scaling & cost optimisation: Capacity planning, performance tuning, and managing infra spend.
• Compliance frameworks: Exposure to SOC 2, GDPR, or supporting client security questionnaires.
• Incident management: Participation in on‑call rotations, leading post‑mortems, or serving as incident commander.

Nice‑to‑Haves

• Certifications (AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, CKS, or equivalent).
• Proficiency in Python; familiarity with Django/Flask.
• Experience with DNS/CDN/edge security (e.g., Cloudflare).
• Observability platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic).
• Static analysis and code quality tools (mypy, Bandit, SonarQube).
• Prior exposure to multi‑tenant SaaS environments.