Lead Platform Engineer

Empowering Africa's tomorrow, together…one story at a time.
With over 100 years of rich history and strongly positioned as a local bank with regional and international expertise, a career with our family offers the opportunity to be part of this exciting growth journey, to reset our future and shape our destiny as a proudly African group.

Job Summary
Build high-performing, scalable, enterprise-grade Platform services & build capability in others to do the same. This includes but is not limited to applying critical thinking, design thinking and problem solving skills in an agile team environment to solve complex technical problems with high quality solutions & leading all phases of the development lifecycle to deliver against business requirements at an optimal cost to serve.

Job Description
P
Are you ready to make a difference?
Join an exciting and dynamic team of API Gateway Platform Engineers, who are responsible for shaping the technical API economy for the bank.

Work within the Platforms and Engineering Gateway technology tribe responsible for the development, design and run of the Datapower API Gateway platform. Apply platform engineering expertise, critical thinking, design thinking and problem-solving skills to produce well-organized, optimized and documented source code that successfully delivers platform features, components of the service and solves complex technical problems with high quality solutions. Capable of resolving escalated issues arising from operations of the Datapower API Gateway Platform.

Key accountabilities: (What you'll get to do)

• Leverage platform engineering expertise and a working knowledge of specific platforms (physical Datapower Gateway appliances, API Connect v10, vmware, Kubernetes, AWS services) and their constituent parts to positively contribute to platform feature and service designs
• Automate tasks through appropriate tools and scripting e.g. Kubernetes, Python, Terraform
• Use and configure modern observability techniques leveraging e.g. aggregated logging via Elastic Search stack, Kafka, metrics via Prometheus / Grafana
• Leverage platform (service design and code) and engineering technical expertise to proactively identify risks and prevent defects
• Uphold our technical principles off: self-service, scalability, re-usability, resilience & stability in all development practices and deliver feature sets that sustainably deliver on these principles
• Enable problem resolution across technical teams, apply and or facilitate root cause analysis, deeply understand the root causes of issues and find ways to resolve them (sustainably)
• Optimize, refactor and reuse components to improve performance and maintainability – ensuring maximum efficiency, effectiveness, and return on investment
• Take accountability for maintaining platform standards and best practices, and drive adoption across multiple service teams
• Contribute to a high-performance team environment by coaching and mentoring other engineers, support engineering teams on technical solutions and problem resolution, and proactively seek coaching and mentoring from others

Role/Person specification: (What do you need to get in?)

• +3 years Datapower Gateway experience (admin, operational and development)
• +3 years API Connect 2018 / v10 experience (admin, operational and development)
• +3 years coding / scripting languages experience e.g. Python, JavaScript, Bash scripting, GoLang, XSLT, Gateway Scripting
• +3 years' experience in Kubernetes architecture, Networking, Security, Deployment, and Management
• +3 years messaging protocols and API technologies experience like SOAP and REST
• +3 years Infrastructure as code (IaC) tooling experience (like Jenkins, GITOPS, AWS CI/CD tools eg. Terraform, CloudFormation, CodeBuilder, CodeDeploy)
• +3 years analytics tools and Big Data Platforms experience like Elastic Search, Kafka (Hadoop)
• +3 years Web Security protocols experience like OAuth, JWT, OIDC
• +3 years Networking experience with a solid understanding of Network layer routing and security

Ideal Certifications:

• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) and Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) or Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist CKS)
• AWS Associate level certifications
• IBM Certified Solution Implementer - DataPower Gateway v10
• IBM Certified Solution Implementer - API Connect v10

If you're passionate about working in a fast-paced environment and contributing to the exciting world of API Platforms by leading from the front, we would love to hear from you

Education
Bachelor's Degree: Information Technology

Absa Bank Limited is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer. In compliance with the Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998, preference will be given to suitable candidates from designated groups whose appointments will contribute towards achievement of equitable demographic representation of our workforce profile and add to the diversity of the Bank.
Absa Bank Limited reserves the right not to make an appointment to the post as advertised