Job Description

• A leading Telecom company is looking for a DevOps Engineer to join their team in Johannesburg, GP. The DevOps Engineer will design, implement, and manage on-premises and hybrid cloud infrastructure, focusing on automation, scalability, and security. This requires expertise in CI/CD, infrastructure automation, and networking to streamline processes using tools like Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, and Terraform.
• The role specifically supports data-intensive platforms such as Apache NiFi, Kafka, Spark, Trino, and MinIO, ensuring telecom-regulatory compliance and multi-tenant high availability. Additionally, the engineer will provide technical leadership, mentor junior team members, and drive DevOps best practices.

Responsibilities: 

• Design, build, and maintain on-premises and hybrid cloud infrastructure, ensuring scalability, fault tolerance, and high availability to support business-critical and regulatory applications.
• Automate provisioning and configuration management using Ansible, Terraform, or Puppet, reducing manual effort and ensuring consistency.
• Support air-gapped deployments and complex networking requirements in regulator or operator data centres.
• Develop and enhance CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, ArgoCD) to support frequent, reliable releases.
• Implement automated deployment strategies (blue-green, canary releases) to minimize downtime.
• Integrate security and compliance checks directly into the CI/CD process.
• Support ingestion and processing stacks based on Apache NiFi, Kafka, Spark, Trino, and MinIO/Hudi.
• Ensure pipelines are optimized for high throughput telecom/financial data.
• Collaborate with data engineers on schema evolution, versioning, and large-scale ETL/ELT jobs.
• Configure and manage HAProxy, firewalls (UFW/iptables), VPNs, and secure ingress services (SFTPGo, Keycloak for IAM).
• Implement HA/DR strategies with strict uptime SLAs (99.9%+).
• Apply security best practices (encryption, access control, logging, compliance with GDPR/local laws, ISO 27001).
• Manage monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Fluentd/Fluentbit, Alertmanager) for full visibility of infrastructure and pipelines.
• Lead incident response, perform RCA, and proactively resolve bottlenecks.
• Define and track SLAs for ingestion latency, uptime, and recovery time.
• Work with cross-functional teams (developers, data engineers, regulators) to align infrastructure with project goals.
• Mentor junior engineers, share best practices, and lead DevOps initiatives.
• Produce comprehensive documentation and knowledge transfer packages for regulator IT teams during handover.

Requirements: 

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
• 7+ years DevOps experience in on-premises and hybrid environments with strong Linux (RedHat, Ubuntu, Debian) administration.
• Expertise with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible, Puppet).
• Strong experience with CI/CD platforms (Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, ArgoCD).
• Hands-on expertise with containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift).
• Experience with virtualization (KVM, OpenStack) and bare-metal deployments.
• Strong scripting/programming (Python, Bash; Go or Ruby a plus).
• Strong background in networking, firewalls, load balancers, Keycloak IAM.
• Experience with monitoring/logging (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Fluentd).
• Deep understanding of security automation, encryption, compliance (GDPR, ISO 27001, telecom-grade data residency rules).
• Ability to thrive in multi-tenant, regulator-facing, and SLA-driven environments.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, including remote cross-border teamwork.
• Experience mentoring teams and leading DevOps initiatives.