Platform Engineering Lead: AI Infra & DevEx (Cape Town)

ZappiStore; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 1,300,000 - 1,600,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Unlimited holidays

Mental health days

Office facilities

Private medical health cover

Medical aid

Life & disability

Wellbeing benefits

Secure parking

Free coffee & lunches

Career development allowances

Job summary

Zappi’s Platform Engineering leadership role is based in Cape Town, overseeing a team of five platform and SRE engineers. You will drive core infrastructure, GPU/AI workloads, and the in-house developer platform to enable rapid deployment, safe experiments with AI, and scalable operations across London and Cape Town.

You’ll influence architecture, coach engineers, run technical discussions, and shape roadmaps while maintaining cost awareness and strong security.

Qualifications

• We don't mind which degree you have or which exact tools you've used.
• Strong platform skills: Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure (ideally AWS), infrastructure as code, CI/CD and observability.
• You’re comfortable debating architecture with senior engineers.
• Excited about AI in engineering and using tools like Claude Code or Codex.
• You’re calm in incidents and run on-call without dread.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of five platform and SRE engineers across two areas (Core Infrastructure and Developer Experience).
• Ensure infrastructure and AI workloads are reliable, secure, current and cost-effective.
• Build tooling to enable teams to ship without manual involvement and move configuration into data.
• Coach and grow engineers, run technical discussions, define roadmaps, and own rollout when things ship.
• Run the team’s support rotation and move common requests to self-serve tools.

Skills

Kubernetes

Cloud infrastructure (AWS)

Infrastructure as code

CI/CD

Observability

GPU/AI infrastructure

System architecture

People management

Tools

kOps

Terraform

GitOps

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

ClickHouse

Postgres

MySQL

Job description

Zappi’s Platform Engineering leadership role is based in Cape Town, overseeing a team of five platform and SRE engineers. You will drive core infrastructure, GPU/AI workloads, and the in-house developer platform to enable rapid deployment, safe experiments with AI, and scalable operations across London and Cape Town.

You’ll influence architecture, coach engineers, run technical discussions, and shape roadmaps while maintaining cost awareness and strong security.