DevOps Engineer

About the role

You will join a small senior crew embedded inside a client organisation, usually a bank, telco, health system or energy operator. You will work in their repository, on their CI, in their on-call rotation. The systems are consequential and the constraints are real: regulatory scrutiny, legacy integration, and a business that cannot tolerate a bad release.

You will find pipelines that take hours, environments that drift, and deployments that require a person. Your job is to make releasing boring — and to leave the client's own engineers able to run it after you go.

The team you join

You will work with the client's platform and engineering teams, and with whoever currently gets paged at night.

What you will do

• Build and operate CI/CD pipelines that make a safe release routine.
• Manage infrastructure as code, usually Terraform on Kubernetes.
• Establish observability: logging, metrics and tracing people actually use.
• Improve reliability through better deployment practice, not more process.
• Share on-call with the team, and fix what wakes you up.

Minimum qualifications

• Five or more years in platform, infrastructure or DevOps roles.
• Strong Kubernetes and infrastructure-as-code experience.
• Scripting or programming ability beyond configuration.
• Experience running production systems with real availability expectations.
• A bias toward removing toil rather than documenting it.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience in a regulated or audited environment.
• Exposure to progressive delivery: canaries, feature flags, blue-green.
• Cost optimisation experience at meaningful scale.

Your first three months

1. Measure how long a release actually takes today, end to end.
2. Remove one manual step from the path to production in your first fortnight.
3. Get observability in place that a tired person can use at 3am.
4. By month three, have handed running the platform back to the client's own engineers.

Compensation and benefits

Rates are agreed per engagement and depend on scope and seniority. We discuss numbers openly on the first call, before you spend time on a practical.

• Rates are agreed per engagement and discussed openly on the first call, before you spend time on a practical.
• Remote across Africa, with on-site weeks where the engagement calls for them.
• Work embedded inside regulated institutions, on systems with real consequences, alongside senior engineers who review your work and expect you to review theirs.
• Small crews and direct access to partners, with no layers between you and the decisions.
• Long relationships. We would rather work with the same capable people across engagements than hire for a single project.
• Straight answers. We tell you what we can and cannot offer before you commit, and we do not promise what we cannot deliver.

How we interview

The whole process is normally two to three weeks, and we work around your current job.

1. Application review. A partner reads every application. You hear back either way, usually within two working days.
2. Intro call, 45 minutes. Your background, what you want next, and honest answers about the work, the rate and the constraints.
3. Practical session, 4 to 6 hours. A realistic problem close to what the role actually involves, scheduled around you and sized to respect your time.
4. Practical review, 60 minutes. We walk through what you built, why, and what you would change with more time.
5. Partner conversation, 45 minutes. Scope, expectations, terms, and your questions.
6. Decision, normally within two working days of the last conversation.

How to apply

Send an application through the form. A partner reads every one, and you will hear back either way. If you are unsure whether you qualify, apply anyway and say what you are unsure about.

We will tell you what we can and cannot offer before you commit to anything.

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