Senior Infrastructure Engineer

VALR; South Africa; On-site; ZAR 700,000 - 1,200,000; Full time

Job summary

VALR is hiring a Senior Platform Engineer to design and maintain secure, scalable cloud infrastructure. You will own production Kubernetes environments, implement GitOps and CI/CD, and drive reliability and observability across the platform.

You’ll automate infrastructure operations, participate in on-call rotations, and collaborate with Engineering and Security to deliver secure software delivery. Experience with IaC and cloud-native tooling is essential.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience in infrastructure, platform engineering, DevOps or SRE.
• Hands-on Kubernetes in production across cloud platforms.
• Strong container experience with Docker and related tooling.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain secure, scalable cloud infrastructure.
• Manage and improve production Kubernetes environments.
• Implement infrastructure-as-code, GitOps and CI/CD practices.
• Improve reliability, performance, resilience and observability.
• Automate operations and reduce manual toil.
• Participate in on-call rotations and post-incident reviews.
• Troubleshoot complex infrastructure, networking, and security issues.
• Apply security best practices for access controls and secrets.

Skills

Infrastructure

Kubernetes

Docker

Helm

Kustomize

GitOps

Argo CD

Terraform

Pulumi

CI/CD

Linux

Networking basics

Prometheus

Grafana

PagerDuty

Bash scripting

IAM & secrets management

AI tooling (Claude/Codex)

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

Helm

Kustomize

Argo CD

Flux

Terraform

Pulumi

GitLab CI

GitHub Actions

Linux tooling

Terraform

Job description

About Us:
Founded in 2018, headquartered in Johannesburg, and backed by leading investors including Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures and Fidelity’s F-Prime Capital, VALR is a global crypto exchange offering a comprehensive suite of products—including Spot Trading, Spot Margin, Perpetual Futures, Staking, Lending, Borrowing, OTC services, VALR Invest, Crypto Bundles, and VALR Pay. Licensed by South Africa’s FSCA, with regulatory approval in Europe, VALR serves over 1.7 million registered users and 2,000 corporate and institutional clients worldwide. The exchange is dedicated to advancing a just financial future that upholds human dignity and the unity of mankind. For more information, visit valr.com.
Our Vision:
To establish VALR as a global institution that advances the economic life of human civilisation through a borderless, inclusive, and empowering financial ecosystem.
Our Mission:
To contribute towards a global financial system that upholds justice, fosters human dignity, and reflects the oneness of humanity, by serving the financial needs of individuals, communities, and institutions through innovative financial technologies.

• Extensive experience working in infrastructure, platform engineering, DevOps, site reliability engineering, or a related field.
• Strong experience with at least one major public cloud platform, such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure.
• Extensive hands-on experience running and supporting Kubernetes in production.
• Strong understanding of Docker and container-based environments.
• Experience with Kubernetes templating and configuration tools such as Helm and Kustomize.
• Practical experience with GitOps principles and tools such as Argo CD or Flux.
• Strong experience using infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or Pulumi.
• Experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using GitLab, GitHub, or similar platforms.
• Strong knowledge of Linux systems and command-line tools.
• A solid understanding of networking fundamentals, including DNS, TCP/IP, HTTP, TLS, load balancing, proxies, and firewalls.
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools such as Prometheus and Grafana.
• Experience participating in incident response and on-call processes using tools such as PagerDuty.
• Strong automation and scripting skills, particularly using Bash or similar languages.
• A good understanding of infrastructure security, including IAM, secrets management, access controls, and least-privilege principles.
• Proficiency in using AI tools such as Claude or Codex to support technical work, with an understanding of the security and verification considerations involved.
• Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving abilities, particularly within complex production environments.
• Ability to work independently, take ownership of technical outcomes, and collaborate effectively across teams.

• Design, build, and maintain secure, scalable, and highly available cloud infrastructure.
• Manage and continuously improve production Kubernetes environments.
• Implement and maintain infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, and CI/CD practices.
• Improve the reliability, performance, resilience, and observability of VALR’s platform.
• Automate infrastructure operations and eliminate repetitive manual processes.
• Participate in the on-call rotation, respond to production incidents, and contribute to post-incident reviews.
• Troubleshoot complex infrastructure, networking, security, and deployment issues.
• Apply security best practices across infrastructure, access controls, and secrets management.
• Collaborate with Engineering and Security teams to support reliable and secure software delivery.
• Improve infrastructure standards, documentation, and processes while providing technical guidance to other team members.