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

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

Job summary

A tech recruitment agency in Johannesburg is seeking a skilled Platform Engineer to manage Heroku pipelines, CI/CD processes, and performance optimization. The successful candidate will have a strong background in cloud infrastructure, monitoring, and incident response, along with excellent communication skills for collaboration. Ideal for those with 3+ years of experience in managing production applications in cloud environments.

Qualifications

• 3+ years’ operating production apps on Heroku, AWS, DigitalOcean, or similar.
• Hands-on experience with GitHub Actions, Heroku CI, or equivalent.
• Experience with Sentry, Papertrail (or similar), logs, and dashboards.

Responsibilities

• 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).

Skills

Operating production apps on Heroku

CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions

Monitoring and incident response

Security fundamentals

Disaster recovery and backups

Communication and collaboration

Tools

Terraform

Docker

Celery

Job description

SUMMARY :

POSITION INFO :

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.