Senior Platform Engineer Cape Town

Impact; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,500,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible working

Therapy/coaching sessions

Gym reimbursement

RSUs with 3-year vesting

Coursera & PXA courses

Parental leave

Technology stipend

Job summary

impact.com, a leading commerce partnership platform, seeks a senior platform infrastructure engineer to design, deploy, and operate the core infra that powers production services. You’ll build abstractions for high-level infra requirements and deliver reliable, secure deployments with Kubernetes, IaC, and GitOps practices.

You’ll own monitoring of pub/sub systems like Kafka, drive high availability, and mentor junior engineers while upholding quality standards across Shared Services and

Qualifications

• Software or infrastructure engineering experience with production Kubernetes & cloud-native infra.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals; hands-on Java experience.
• Deep Kubernetes expertise and Linux proficiency.
• Fluent networking & cloud-architecture knowledge (VPCs, subnets, load balancers).
• Hands-on IaC (Terraform) and GitOps tooling (Argo CD, Flux or equivalent).
• Experience in production incident response and on‑call readiness.
• Knowledge of observability (metrics, logs, traces) and observability backends.
• Experience mentoring junior engineers; ability to set a technical quality bar.

Responsibilities

• Design, deployment and operation of platform-layer infrastructure (VPCs, compute pools, storage, Kubernetes).
• Own monitoring and operation of managed pub/sub systems (e.g., Kafka).
• Develop abstractions for high-level infra requirements and translate to production-grade deployments with security and high availability.
• Maintain 99.9% uptime and drive >95% change success; implement post-incident learning loops.
• Collaborate with Cloud Ops to use IaC modules and provide feedback for improvements.
• Set technical standards for Shared Services & Infrastructure and mentor engineers.

Skills

Kubernetes

Java

Cloud architecture

Networking

IaC (Terraform)

GitOps tooling (Argo CD, Flux)

Pub/sub (Kafka)

Incident response

Observability basics

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in CS/Engineering

Tools

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

AWS or Azure

Kubernetes tooling

Job description

impact.com is the world’s leading commerce partnership marketing platform, transforming the way businesses grow by enabling them to discover, manage, and scale partnerships across the entire customer journey. From affiliates and influencers to content publishers, brand ambassadors, and customer advocates, impact.com empowers brands to drive trusted, performance-based growth through authentic relationships. Its award-winning products—Performance (affiliate), Creator (influencer), and Advocate (customer referral)—unify every type of partner into one integrated platform. As consumers increasingly rely on recommendations from people and communities they trust, impact.com helps brands show up where it matters most. Today, over 5,000 global brands, including Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L’Oréal, and Fanatics, rely on impact.com to power more than 225,000 partnerships that deliver measurable business results.

As we scale toward 600 product engineers, the infrastructure layer that powers everything - Kubernetes clusters, VPCs, compute pools, storage, shared services - becomes mission-critical. Right now, that infrastructure is the single point of failure for every developer-facing capability the platform team builds. You'll be the senior IC responsible for designing, deploying and operating that substrate. This is more than infrastructure management; it's production-quality software engineering applied to infrastructure. You'll build abstractions that let service teams specify their infrastructure requirements at a high level, then turn those into reliable, secure, performant deployments. This role sits at the intersection of deep cloud-native expertise and solid software engineering discipline.

What You'll Do:

• Lead the design, deployment and operation of platform-layer infrastructure: VPCs, compute pools, storage, Kubernetes clusters, and the networking that connects them - translating configuration data into inputs for IaC modules provided by Cloud Operations.
• Own the monitoring and operation of managed pub/sub messaging systems (e.g. Kafka) that service teams depend on.
• Design and evolve abstractions that allow service teams to express infrastructure requirements at a high level, translating those into production-grade deployments with security and high availability baked in by default.
• Operate platform infrastructure at 99.9% uptime. Own the change management process for infrastructure changes and drive a > 95% change success rate. Build a strong post-incident learning loop.
• Work with Cloud Operations to consume their IaC modules and feed back operational lessons and enhancement requests. Maintain a clean module-consumer relationship that protects both functions.
• Anchor the technical standards for the Shared Services and Infrastructure team: code review quality bar, controller patterns, GitOps idioms, IaC consumption patterns and operational runbooks.
  Mentor junior engineers and set the bar for infrastructure software engineering.

What You Bring:

• Software or infrastructure engineering experience, including operating production Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Strong software-engineering fundamentals and hands‑on experience with Java.
• Deep Kubernetes expertise and comfort with Linux command line.
• Strong networking and cloud architecture fluency: VPCs, subnets, load balancing, security, service mesh interaction.
• Hands‑on experience with IaC tools (Terraform) and GitOps tooling (Argo CD, Flux or equivalent).
• Solid experience participating in production incident response. You're comfortable being on‑call for critical infrastructure.
• Working knowledge of observability fundamentals (metrics, logs, traces) and experience consuming platform observability backends.
• Experience mentoring junior engineers; you can set and maintain a technical quality bar.
• A Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Hands‑on experience with GCP (primary), AWS or Azure (preferred).
• Experience designing and operating shared services infrastructure at scale (preferred)
• Familiarity with pub/sub messaging systems like Kafka and their operational characteristics (preferred)
• Experience with service mesh patterns and their infrastructure implications (preferred)

Benefits and Perks:

At impact.com, we believe that when you’re happy and fulfilled, you do your best work. That’s why we’ve built a benefits package that supports your well‑being, growth, and work-life balance.

• Flexible Working: Our Responsible PTO policy means you can take the time off you need to rest and recharge. We're committed to a positive work-life balance and provide a flexible environment that allows you to be happy and fulfilled in both your career and your personal life.
• Health and Wellness: Your well‑being is a priority. Our mental health and wellness benefit includes up to 12 fully covered therapy/coaching sessions per year, with additional dependent coverage. We also offer a monthly gym reimbursement policy to support your physical health.
• A Stake in Our Growth: We offer Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) as part of our total compensation, giving you a stake in the company's growth with a 3-year vesting schedule, pending Board approval.
• Investing in Your Growth: We’re committed to your continuous learning. Take advantage of our free Coursera subscription and our PXA courses.
• Parental Support: We offer a generous parental leave policy, 26 weeks of fully paid leave for the primary caregiver and 13 weeks fully paid leave for the secondary caregiver.
• Technology Financial Support: We provide a technology stipend to help you set up your home office and a monthly allowance to cover your internet expenses

impact.com is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. All employees and applicants for employment shall be given fair treatment and equal employment opportunity regardless of their race, ethnicity or ancestry, color or caste, religion or belief, age, sex (including gender identity, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, pregnancy/maternity), national origin, weight, neurodivergence, disability, marital and civil partnership status, caregiving status, veteran status, genetic information, political affiliation, or other prohibited non‑merit factors.