Senior DevOps Engineer

Collinson; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 600,000 - 900,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading company in the travel sector is seeking a passionate Senior DevOps Engineer to join their innovative team in Cape Town. This role involves designing and optimizing AWS infrastructure while ensuring robust automation and reliability. You'll leverage your expertise in CI/CD pipelines, security best practices, and observability to drive the company's cloud-native journey. Join us to make a meaningful impact and be part of an environment focused on continual improvement and diversity.

Benefits

Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives

Training and Development Opportunities

Flexible Working Environment

Qualifications

• Expert knowledge of Terraform and AWS required.
• Strong experience with CI/CD processes essential.
• Proven experience running production-level Kubernetes platforms.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement and optimize AWS infrastructure through Infrastructure as Code.
• Take ownership of CI/CD pipelines to automate fast and secure deployments.
• Ensure platform reliability and participate in Disaster Recovery planning.

Skills

AWS Networking

CI/CD

Terraform

Kubernetes

Automation

Monitoring

Security Best Practices

Tools

Terraform

AWS

DataDog

Bash

Python

Job description

Collinson is the global, privately-owned company dedicated to helping the world to travel with ease and confidence. The group offers a unique blend of industry and sector specialists who together provide market-leading airport experiences, loyalty and customer engagement, and insurance solutions for over 400 million consumers.

Collinson is the operator of Priority Pass, the world’s original and leading airport experiences programme. Travellers can access a network of 1,500+ lounges and travel experiences, including dining, retail, sleep and spa, in over 650 airports in 148 countries, helping to elevate the journey into something special. We work with the world’s leading payment networks, over 1,400 banks, 90 airlines and 20 hotel groups worldwide.

We have been bringing innovation to the market since inception – from launching the first independent global VIP lounge access Programme, Priority Pass to being the first to sell direct travel insurance in the UK through Columbus Direct and creating the first loyalty agency of its kind in the travel sector with ICLP. Today we still invest heavily in innovation to ensure that we continue to deliver superior customer experiences.

Key clients include Mastercard, American Express, Cathay Pacific, British Airways, LATAM, Flying Blue, Accor, EasyJet, HSBC, Chase, HDFC.

Our mission is focused on doing good beyond profit, which for us means we seek out opportunities for our people to share in our success and that we give back to the communities and people within which we work.

Never short of ambition, the success of our business is delivered through the diverse and talented team of over 2,200 global colleagues.

The Role

As a Senior DevOps Engineer, you’ll be a key figure within our DevOps team, designing and building a robust, scalable, and reliable 0-downtime platform. You’ll be hands-on every day - architecting and implementing AWS infrastructure as code, taking ownership of CI/CD pipelines, and solving complex challenges. Your expertise will help shape our approach to automation, observability, and reliability, and you’ll be part of the go-to references for DevOps best practices within the team.

This is a great opportunity to work with a forward-thinking team, and the freedom to approach problems with fresh thinking, embedding AI and automation and helping shape our cloud-native journey.

If you’re passionate about automation, cloud infrastructure, and delivering high-quality production-grade platforms, this role offers the chance to make a real impact.

Key Responsibilities

• Hands-On Development - Design, implement, and optimise AWS infrastructure through Infrastructure as Code, ensuring environments are robust, scalable and cost-effective.

• Automation & CI/CD - Be an authority on CI/CD pipelines to automate fast, secure and seamless deployments, with a strong emphasis on improving developer experience to automate routine tasks and improve operational efficiency.

• Platform Reliability - Ensure high availability, scalability, and resilience of our platform, leveraging managed services and utilising the AWS shared responsibility model to clearly define and manage the division of responsibilities for security, compliance, and maintenance. Participate in Disaster Recovery testing to ensure platform resilience and business continuity

• Monitoring & Observability - Take ownership of proactive observability using DataDog and other tools to monitor system health, performance, and security, making sure we can see and fix issues before they impact users

• Cloud Security & Best Practices - Apply cloud and security best practices, including patching and secure configuration of networking, encryption (at rest and in transit), secrets and identity/access management.

• Collaboration - Work closely with development, testing, and security teams to support application delivery and platform improvements.

• Continuous Improvement - Contribute ideas and solutions to evolve our DevOps processes, platform reliability, and developer experience.

• Provide mentorship to less experienced engineers

• AI & Future Tech - We want to push the boundaries of AI-driven development - if you have ideas on how to embed AI into our DevOps processes, you’ll have the space to explore them.

Your Experience

• Tech stack - We use Terraform, Terragrunt, Ansible, Helm, Python, Bash, AWS (EKS, Lambda, EC2, RDS/Aurora), Linux OS & Github Actions. You’re comfortable with all of these and are an expert with Terraform and IaC principles, CI/CD and a multi-region AWS ecosystem.

• Strong experience with AWS Networking (VPC, Subnets, Security Groups, API Gateway, Load Balancing, WAF, NAT & Transit gateways, Network Firewall), and Cloud configuration (Secrets Manager, IAM, KMS, SCPs)

• Proven experience running a production-grade Kubernetes platform, utilising ArgoCD, Isitio & Deployment strategies (blue/green & canary)

• Familiarity with Cloud Security services such as Security Hub, Guard Duty, Inspector and vulnerability management/patching. Knowledge of security tooling (SIEM/SOC, Crowdstrike & Rapid7) and compliance frameworks such as CIS Benchmarks, OWASP & PCI DSS (v4) is advantageous

• Familiarity with Disaster Recovery and Resilience Strategies - Experience with automated AWS backup solutions and disaster recovery tools such as FIS.

• Observability Mindset - You believe in measuring everything. You’ve worked with DataDog (or similar) to ensure teams have visibility into platform health and security.

• Experience with embedding AI into DevOps processes is advantageous

Collinson is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes differences in all their forms including: colour, race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, neurodivergence, family status, age, individuals with disabilities and people from all backgrounds, cultures and experiences as we strongly believe this contributes to our on-going success.

We are focused on continually evolving our purpose driven, high performing culture, providing an environment where our people have the opportunity to achieve their full potential and do interesting and meaningful work. Our company values are: Take Action, Do the right thing, One team and Be insight led. These help guide everything we do internally in terms of how we think, act and interact, right through to how we deliver value to our customers and clients.

In your application, please feel free to note which pronouns you use (For example - she/her/hers, he/him/his, they/them/theirs, etc).