Senior DevOps Engineer

Blue Pearl PTY; Johannesburg; On-site; ZAR 700,000 - 900,000; Full time

Job summary

Blue Pearl PTY in Johannesburg is seeking a hands-on DevOps Engineer to work in an AWS native banking environment. The role focuses on building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, automating AWS workload provisioning, and ensuring compliance within a regulated environment. Candidates should have over 7 years of experience in DevOps, with strong expertise in AWS and automation. This position offers opportunities for collaboration across teams and aims at improving delivery excellence in a fast-paced industry.

Qualifications

• 7+ years hands-on experience in a DevOps or SRE role.
• Strong AWS workload automation experience.
• Experience implementing CI/CD pipeline automation.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain CI/CD pipelines.
• Automate AWS workload provisioning and configuration.
• Integrate security and compliance controls into pipelines.

Skills

AWS environment experience

CI/CD pipeline automation

Infrastructure as code

Site Reliability Engineering principles

Networking principles and protocols

Tools

AWS CDK

CloudFormation

Ansible

Linux

Windows Server

Job description

Johannesburg, South Africa | Posted on 05/13/2026

We are looking for a hands‑on DevOps Engineer to operate inside a AWS native banking environment. You will own the build, automation, and operational tooling that delivery teams rely on everyday CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, environment provisioning, configuration management, and the developer experience that surrounds them.

This is an engineering role first. You will spend the majority of your time in code and configuration: writing pipelines, building automation, hardening environments, and removing manual toil from the path to production. You will work alongside developers, architects, security engineers, and platform teams to keep delivery flowing reliably inside a regulated, PCI‑DSS environment.

Site Reliability Engineering experience is a strong advantage. You will use it to push the platform further, sharpen observability, improve incident response, lower failure domains, and resilience patterns built into the way services are deployed and run.

What you will do:

Core DevOps Engineering

• Design, build, and maintain CI/CD pipelines that move code from commit to production safely and repeatably across the delivery estate.
• Automate AWS workload provisioning and configuration deployment using infrastructure as code, with environments that are reproducible, version‑controlled, and auditable.
• Build and operate the deployment automation, release tooling, and environment management that delivery squads depend on day to day.
• Harden the developer experience with repository templates, pipeline templates, deployment patterns, and self‑service tooling that reduce friction without weakening control.
• Integrate security and compliance controls into pipelines and infrastructure secrets management, access control, and change traceability.
• Translate business and technical requirements into scalable, automated delivery solutions that align to the AWS Well‑Architected Framework.
• Work hands‑on across an AWS estate, integrating cloud‑native services with on‑premises systems where the banking environment requires it.
• Build and operate workloads across EC2, RDS (EBS, EKS, ECS, Load Balancing, Secrets Manager, KMS, and Service Catalog).
• Use AWS CDK as the primary infrastructure‑as‑code tool, with CloudFormation, Ansible, and scripting languages applied where they fit best.
• Apply networking fundamentals routing, segmentation, security groups, DNS, TLS, and load balancing to design environments that are both secure and operable.
• Support the operational lifecycle of platform services the wider engineering organization depends on, including identity, messaging, and application server tiers where present.

Site Reliability Advantageous Depth

• Identify and reduce failure domains across the platform, designing systems that contain blast radius and recover gracefully from partial failure.
• Apply SRE principles SLOs, post‑incident learning to improve reliability, performance, and the team's response to production issues.
• Enhance observability across environments through stronger monitoring, structured logging, useful alerting, and dashboards that surface what matters during an incident.
• Troubleshoot and optimise low‑latency, Java‑based applications in production, working alongside application engineers to resolve issues at the system level.
• Build automation that minimizes business impact during maintenance and failures, and that reduces the operational load carried by delivery teams.
• Contribute as a strong technical voice in a cross‑functional team alongside Architects, Engineers, Business Analysts, Scrum Masters, and Security partners.
• Mentor engineers across the team on DevOps practice, AWS engineering, automation, and where applicable SRE principles through pairing, code review, and worked examples.
• Drive collaboration across squads, lifting the standard of automation, observability, and operational discipline beyond the immediate team.
• Champion delivery excellence: secure, automated, observable, and repeatable as the default way of working.

Requirements

What We're Looking For

• 7+ years hands‑on experience in a DevOps or SRE role, with a clear weighting toward DevOps engineering, automation, and CI/CD delivery.
• Hands‑on experience in AWS environment, preferably in financial services with PCI‑DSS compliant systems.
• Demonstrable track record implementing CI/CD pipeline automation across functional areas of a delivery organization.
• Strong AWS workload automation experience covering infrastructure provisioning and software configuration rollout.
• Practical experience implementing observability for hybrid and cloud‑based environments.
• Strong working knowledge of networking principles and protocols.
• Working understanding of the AWS Well‑Architected Framework and how to apply it in practice.

Advantageous Experience

• Demonstrable experience with Site Reliability Engineering principles and practices in production environments.
• Troubleshooting low‑latency, Java‑based applications in an SRE context and infrastructure‑level performance investigation.
• Experience operating inside an audit‑heavy regulated environment beyond PCI‑DSS change control, evidence capture, segregation of duties.

Ways of Working

• A hands‑on engineer at heart most effective when the work is in pipelines, code, and configuration rather than in process documents.
• Pragmatic about automation: automates what matters, leaves what doesn't, and knows the difference.
• Strong collaborator across engineering, security, and operations, with the ability to translate technical decisions into language non‑engineers can act on.
• Holds the line on operational and security discipline without becoming a blocker to delivery.

Technical and Tooling

• AWS Services: EC2, RDS, EBS, EKS, ECS, Load Balancing, Secrets Manager, KMS, Service Catalog.
• Observability tooling: AWS CloudWatch, Splunk or AppDynamics, ELK.
• Operating Systems: Linux and Windows Server.

Preferred

• Zabbix monitoring.
• WebLogic 14c.

Beneficial Certifications