Senior Engineering Manager - Platform Engineering

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

Benefits offered by this job

Unlimited holidays

Private medical healthcare cover

Medical Aid

Group life & disability contributions

Wellbeing benefits (yoga, therapists)

Job summary

Zappi is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to lead the Platform Engineering team in Cape Town. You will drive core infrastructure and AI workloads, building the developer platform that enables safe, scalable deployments across environments.

You will coach engineers, shape the roadmap, and own rollout while balancing on-call duties. The role requires deep hands-on experience with Kubernetes, cloud infra, and IaC, with a strong focus on reliability and cost efficiency.

Qualifications

• Around ten years in software or infrastructure engineering, with at least three of those managing platform, SRE or infrastructure engineers.
• Strong Kubernetes and cloud infra skills; IaC, CI/CD, and observability.
• Comfortable debating architecture with senior engineers and product/engineering leaders.
• Experience with self-managed Kubernetes, GPU/AI infrastructure is a plus.

Responsibilities

• You will lead a team of five platform and SRE engineers across two areas.
• Oversee Core Infrastructure to keep infra reliable, secure, current and cost-effective (Terraform, kOps on AWS EC2).
• Own Developer Experience by building in‑house tooling for self-serve deployments and configs.
• Lead technical discussions, set roadmap, and own rollout when ships; manage the on-call rotation.
• Foster growth of engineers through coaching, feedback, and mentorship.

Skills

Platform engineering leadership

SRE management

Architecture discussions

AI in engineering

Incident response

People management

DevOps culture

Ten years experience

Education

Any degree

Tools

Kubernetes

AWS Cloud

Terraform

CI/CD

Prometheus

Grafana

PostgreSQL

MySQL

Job description

Compensation: R1.3M–R1.6M base per annum + a 10% annual bonus

Application Deadline: 26 November 2026

Department: Engineering

Location: Cape Town, SA

Compensation: R1.3M–R1.6M base per annum + a 10% annual bonus

Description

Zappi helps some of the world’s biggest brands test ideas before they spend money bringing them to life. That means new products, ads, names, packaging and flavours. Our customers make big decisions on our data, so it has to be accurate, fast and affordable.

We make around $100M in revenue. Our product engineering team is about 90 people, based in London and Cape Town.

Why this role exists

AI has changed how we write code. Throughput at Zappi keeps going up, and the bottleneck is moving to everything around the code. That means environments, config, deploys and access, plus keeping more and more of it running safely and cheaply.

That’s the space Platform Engineering works in. The team runs our core infrastructure and AI workloads, and builds the developer platform our engineers use to set up, deploy, configure and monitor their apps. Infrastructure and app setup are defined as data, which is what makes the platform flexible. In the last month, teams and automations completed over 20,000 deployments, 5,600 of them to production, all without needing us. Anything we make easier gives time back to the rest of engineering.

Next, we want agents working on that same platform. Picture one that spots an error in production, spins up its own isolated environment with the right context, reproduces the issue and works out what’s wrong. It then either hands over a clear diagnosis or opens a pull request with the fix, and we can see and review every step. We can only do that if the platform is built for it.

Our Platform Engineering team runs that platform and builds what comes next. We’re looking for someone to lead it.

What You’ll Do

You’ll lead a team of five platform and SRE engineers, working as one team across two areas.

Core Infrastructure. Keep our infrastructure and AI workloads reliable, secure, current and cost-effective. That means self-managed clusters built with kOps on EC2, everything in Terraform, and GitOps deploys. We already run GPU workloads and self-hosted models in production, and you’ll help teams work out when open-source models beat calling an API.

Developer Experience. Build the tooling that lets teams ship without us in the loop, for people and agents alike. Our in‑house developer platform sits at the centre of it. Several projects are already under way:

• Getting environments the data they need, so nobody loses time waiting for a place to build & test.
• Moving app setup and configuration out of code and into data, so teams can change it without a pull request.
• Making a new environment something you ask for and get in about ten minutes.
• Making sure anything an engineer can do to their app, an agent can do too, with the correct safety guardrails.

You’ll help decide how agents work safely here: what they can do on their own, where the guardrails sit, and how we keep an audit trail.

Lead the team.

You’ll coach and grow engineers with a mix of experience, alongside strong technical leads. You’ll run technical discussions, make the calls with your team, write code where it matters most, and step in when things break. You’ll work with engineers, other EMs and leadership to set the roadmap, and own the rollout when things ship. You’ll also run the team’s support rotation, and reduce it over time by turning common requests into self‑serve tools.

How we work

• We ship small changes all day. We use trunk‑based development and have no release trains.
• Teams own their services, on‑call included. Your team’s job is to make that easy.
• We use AI tools every day, and we share what works and what doesn’t.
• We change course when the evidence says we should.
• Stack: self‑managed Kubernetes (kOps on AWS EC2) with Cloudflare at the edge. Prometheus, Mimir, Tempo, OpenTelemetry and Grafana for observability. Apps are mostly Rails and Elixir/Phoenix, on ClickHouse and Postgres or MySQL, with a mix of frontier and open‑source AI models.

What we’re looking for

We don’t mind which degree you have or which exact tools you’ve used.

We’d love to see:

• Strong platform skills: Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure (ideally AWS), infrastructure as code, CI/CD and observability. You’re comfortable debating architecture with senior engineers.
• Excited and curious about AI in engineering. You use tools like Claude Code or Codex yourself, and you’ve thought about how AI can work safely on real systems.
• High standards for running production: availability, upgrades, security, cost and capacity. You’re calm in an incident and run on‑call in a way people don’t dread.
• Product sense. You treat engineers as your customers, ask why until you find the real problem, and know a tool isn’t done until people use it.
• A real enjoyment of managing people: growing engineers, giving honest feedback and helping a team through change.
• Around ten years in software or infrastructure engineering, with at least three of those managing platform, SRE or infrastructure engineers.

Big pluses

running self‑managed Kubernetes (ideally with kOps), and GPU or AI infrastructure. We’ll help you grow into either.

Where you’ll be

You’ll be based in Cape Town, reporting to our Director of Engineering, and working with engineering teams in both London and Cape Town.

Benefits

• Salary range for the role is R1.3M–R1.6M base per annum + a 10% annual bonus
• Unlimited holidays – we want well rested and motivated teams so encourage people to take plenty of time off. We don’t cap your allowance, but do set a minimum of at least 20 days per year plus national holidays
• Three company‑paid mental health days of rest every year (these are pre‑scheduled, so the entire company can take the same days off regularly to reset)
• Thoughtfully designed offices to support both individual work and collaboration without interrupting others
• Private medical healthcare cover
• Medical Aid
• Group risk, life & disability contributions
• Wellbeing benefits such as free yoga and access to trained therapists / counsellors
• Paid 24h secure parking in Cape Town
• Free coffee, lunches and in‑office snacks
• Tailored personal development through training allowances, coaching, mentorship and career frameworks