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Head of Platform Engineering

E-Merge

Remote · South Africa Contract Lead 2w ago

About the role

About

We're hiring a Head of Platform Engineering to take full ownership of our infrastructure and scale it for the next phase of growth.

This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who thrives in building, not inheriting - you'll define the architecture, set the standards, and lead a high-performing team from the ground up. You'll work closely with the CTO to shape both the platform and the team, with AI-assisted engineering at the core of how we operate.

What You'll Own

  • End-to-end platform infrastructure - architecture, build, and operational maturity
  • Production AWS environments (EKS, RDS/Aurora, VPC, ALB/NLB, IAM, ElastiCache, CloudFront)
  • Kubernetes at scale - cluster management, autoscaling, and networking policies
  • Microservices architecture - service discovery, resilience, and load balancing
  • Database performance and scalability - replication, sharding, caching
  • Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or similar)
  • CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, or similar)
  • Observability - logging, tracing, alerting, SLOs
  • Security - IAM, network segmentation, and secrets management

What We're Looking For

  • 4 to 6 years in platform, DevOps, or infrastructure engineering
  • At least 2 years in a leadership or lead role
  • Strong AWS and Kubernetes experience in production environments
  • Deep understanding of distributed systems and scalable architecture
  • Comfortable working with AI-assisted tooling and automation
  • Excellent written communication skills (async-first environment)

Nice to Have

  • Experience in regulated environments (PCI DSS, SOC 2)
  • Exposure to Azure
  • FinOps and cost optimisation experience

Contract Details

  • Reference Number: GZ61236
  • Type: Contract, REMOTE, long term contract
  • Rate: R900 per hour negotiable on experience and ability.

Contact Garth on @.co.za or call him on ()-**** to discuss this and other opportunities.

Are you ready for a change of scenery? The e-Merge IT recruitment is a specialist niche recruitment agency. We offer our candidates options so that we can successfully place the right developers with the right companies in the right roles. Check out the e-Merge website for more great positions.

Do you have a friend who is a developer or technology specialist? We pay cash for successful referrals!

Skills

AWSArgoCDCloudFrontCI/CDDevOpsEKSElastiCacheIAMInfrastructure as CodeKubernetesMicroservicesNLBObservabilityPlatform EngineeringRDSTerraformVPC

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