DevOps Team Lead

Role
:
DevOps Team Lead

Location
: Cape Town (Southern Suburbs)

Industry
: Fintech

Workplace Type
: Hybrid

We are seeking a
DevOps Team Lead
on behalf of our client, an innovative, consumer facing fintech specialising in providing fast loans, affordable insurance products and value-added services to their rapidly growing customer base.

The role is responsible for leading the DevOps function and ensuring reliable, secure, and scalable infrastructure that enables high-velocity software delivery. The successful candidate will bring deep technical expertise in AWS, Linux, and automation, combined with strong leadership and mentoring capabilities. This is a hands-on role where the Team Lead will both guide the team and contribute directly to building and maintaining the platform that scales and supports multiple product engineering squads.

Key Technical Competencies:

Technical leadership in AWS and Linux environments, strong automation and CI/CD expertise, collaboration, problem-solving, accountability, communication, continuous improvement, adaptability, and security-conscious engineering practices.

Reporting to:
Engineering Manager

Direct Reports:
3-5 DevOps Engineers

The Team:
The engineering team forms an integral part of our client's fintech business, collaborating with several departments and is responsible for the development and support of multiple systems, websites, applications, and mobile apps.

Key Responsibilities:

Leadership & Team Development:

• Lead and mentor a team of 3–5 DevOps Engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, learning, and continuous improvement.
• Define and uphold DevOps best practices across CI/CD, infrastructure, security, and monitoring.
• Partner with Engineering Managers, Architects, and Product teams to align DevOps priorities with product delivery goals.
• Manage workloads, priorities, and performance for the DevOps team.

Cloud Infrastructure & Operations:

• Design, build, and maintain AWS-based infrastructure supporting critical production and non-production environments.
• Implement and maintain infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar).
• Administer and optimise Linux systems and ensure environment consistency through automation.
• Manage configuration, access control, and monitoring of multiple AWS accounts.

Automation & CI/CD:

• Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines to support frequent, reliable releases across microservices and applications.
• Automate build, test, deployment, and infrastructure provisioning processes.
• Integrate observability and alerting into the pipeline for early detection and rollback.

Monitoring, Reliability & Security:

• Oversee the observability stack (e.g.,Grafana, CloudWatch, ELK).
• Drive system reliability, performance, and uptime improvements across environments.
• Collaborate with Security and IT Operations to ensure compliance with governance and security policies (PoPIA, GDPR, etc.).

Continuous Improvement & Collaboration:

• Identify and implement tooling or process enhancements that reduce friction for engineering teams.
• Participate in architecture discussions and capacity planning to support scaling initiatives.
• Provide incident response leadership during production events and drive post-incident reviews.

Required Skills & Experience:

• 7+ years total experience in DevOps, Cloud, or Infrastructure Engineering.
• 2+ years leading or mentoring a technical team.
• Expert knowledge of AWS services (EC2, EKS, Lambda, RDS, S3, CloudWatch, IAM, etc.).
• Advanced proficiency with Linux systems administration.
• Strong experience with Terraform, Ansible, or other infrastructure-as-code tools.
• Proficient with CI/CD tooling such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or AWS CodePipeline.
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and container orchestration.
• Familiarity with monitoring and logging frameworks (Grafana, ELK).
• Solid scripting ability in Bash, Python, or similar.
• Strong understanding of networking, security, and identity management in cloud environments.

Desired Qualifications & Competencies:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent relevant experience)
• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer / Solutions Architect.
• Experience in financial services, fintech, or other regulated industries.
• Familiarity with Agile / SAFe practices.
• Exposure to cost optimization and multi-account AWS governance frameworks.