Head of Platform Engineering
E-Merge
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.
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Skills
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