Senior Platform Engineering Manager — AI Infra Leader

Zappi

Cape Town

On-site

ZAR 1,300,000 - 1,600,000

Full time

4 days ago

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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.